Film Review | The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Tolkien fans! What you suspected a year ago has been made crystal clear now, with the release of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Yes, Peter Jackson's puffed-up prequel The Lord of the Rings will never scale the heights of its cinematic predecessor.

Expanding JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit - a children's story which details events prior to the LOTR trilogy - into another three films of equal length and girth was always a risky proposition.

So Jackson had to ruin the sterling reputation he had in cinema fantasy land with last year's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Padding the first part of Tolkien's narrative with background information founds in appendices, notes and 'Unfinished Tales' which form part of Tolkien lore, the end result was uneven and clumsy - a clear indication that Jackson and his cadre of screenwriters weren't quite matching his ambition to patchwork The Hobbit narrative into 'epic mode'.

Is its sequel, The Desolation of Smaug, more of the same? The answer is an unequivocal 'yes and no'. For while its structural problems remain very much apparent, the sequel ramps up the action so much that you probably won't care.

Continuing where its predecessor left off, 'Desolation' finds our hobbit protagonist Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) clutching onto a secret - his discovery and theft of the fateful 'one ring' in the last film - while accompanying the band of 13 dwarves as they head to the 'Lonely Mountain' to reclaim their homeland.

But there's the small matter of a large dragon, Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) holding dominion over it, and in order to even come close to the beast, the gang needs to hack their way to the treacherous Mirkwood Forest, populated by the merciless Wood Elves, headed by the mercurial King Thranduil (Lee Pace).

"But haven't they got the trusty wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) on their side?", I hear you ask. "He will clear the path for them, surely?"

Yeah... about that. If you're even casually familiar with Tolkien's world, you'll know about Gandalf's habit of scooting off to a far-flung part of Middle Earth on some seemingly arbitrary but ultimately highly important pretext. He pulls that here again - and the implications of the things he encounters are indeed cataclysmic - leaving our band to fend for themselves across genuinely treacherous terrain... 

The modus operandi of Jackson's new approach to Tolkien's world appears to be "speed everything up to cover any mistakes". There are 'action beats' aplenty - which, to be fair, just about match up to the original book's chock-a-block incident-laden narrative - and belly laughs wherever he can squeeze them, ensuring that the audience is never bored, at the very least.

There is of course something fundamentally sad to all of this: The Lord of the Rings trilogy never felt the need to employ such cheap tricks, and took its time to tell its story not because it wanted to cram as many 'wow' moments as possible, but because it had enough story to begin with.

So in order for fans to fully enjoy this take on the Tolkien source material, some mental re-adjustments would have to be made. It boils down to this: if you view The Hobbit trilogy as a 'B-movie' version of the LOTR films, you should be okay.

There are inspired individual moments that will elicit both chuckles and awe.

Because I know this is what you care about the most, let's get it out of the way now: that dragon. Smaug looks like a real beast, and not a CGI creation, which is a relief (an early close-up shot of his head confirms it: there's a chunky reptilian texture to him which makes him all the more unnerving to look at).

Jackson is a master of the effortless spectacle and Smaug enables him to show off with great effect. Snaking around the columns of his treasure-laden underground enclosure, you only rarely see him at full size.

In fact, there's a lot to be frightened of in 'The Desolation of Smaug'; starting from the spider-festooned and ever-shifting forest of Mirkwood and down to some menacing orcs (which are, more often than not, dispatched quite brutally). The overall atmosphere is decidedly more 'adult' - as the monster-horror trappings of Mirkwood forest give way to orc-decapitation once LOTR regular Legolas (Orlando Bloom) joins the fray, accompanied by a not-in-the-books female counterpart, Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly).

Her introduction is another example of Jackson's ham-fisted approach this time around. She's clearly just there to box-tick at least one female presence in the film, and a feeble attempt at a love triangle between Legolas - being the king's son, he is technically her superior - and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) is just that: a weak attempt at some emotional down-time from all the running-around-and-rampant-killing/dispatching of orcs.

The most interesting-cum-problematic element is our diminutive heroes' passage across Laketown - their last port of call before they are made to face the great dragon.

Through the enigmatic figure Bard (Luke Evans) a revolutionary rogue, we are suddenly plunged into the politics of this little world, as the town is incompetently run by its uncaring and sloppy Master (Stephen Fry). It's both the worst and the best part of the film: its exposition feels both rushed and largely unnecessary, but it's also a glimpse into a teeming and delightfully messy little part of Middle Earth, lending some texture and variety.

Made almost entirely out of haphazard and imperfect bits, 'The Desolation of Smaug' is certainly never boring. That said, the original Lord of the Rings trilogy - now comfortably and comprehensively preserved on DVD - might actually make for better holiday (re)viewing...