THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG
Release Date: 13 December 2013
Director: Peter Jackson
Running Time: 161 Minutes
Starring: Ian Mckellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry, Orlando Bloom
Reviewed by Kyle Pedley
“So ended the adventures of the Misty Mountains”
Tolkien himself penned this acceptable story juncture in the original Hobbit novel at the same point Peter Jackson and his team opted to draw last years An Unexpected Journey to a close. The late-minute decision to shape his filmic realisation of the novel from two films into a trilogy thus presents us with The Desolation of Smaug, ostensibly a movie compromising of what was originally written, structured and shot as the latter half of one film and the opening half of the second, welded together with the aid of some of Jackson’s signature pick-up shoots to give this film some standalone unity. For the most part Desolation benefits terrifically from this - the climactic nature of the first series of sequences in the film, from an encounter with ‘skin-changer’ Beorn, inventive and genuinely creep clashes with giant spiders and subsequently elves in Mirkwood, and a barnstorming barrel escape sequence lends it a pacing, urgency and sense of threat that many felt the first film sorely lacked, and the eventual showdown in Erebor with the titular menace is the kind of explosive, adrenaline-fueled finale that gives the movie greater impact and a more conventionally entertaining final act. Where The Two Towers leapt into Kurosawa with the rain-sodden mayhem of Helm’s Deep, Desolation presents a protracted, chaotic confrontation between Smaug, Bilbo and the company of dwarves in the eery, foreboding expanse of the lonely mountain to produce a finale that ensures the ever troublesome ‘middle movie’ keeps an audience hooked, despite ultimately ending on a cliffhanger which feels inevitable and unavoidable as opposed to satisfying and organic.
