Film Review #23: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

     Smaug was a BEAST. Seriously, that's the first thing that I thought of coming out of the movie theater. But let's not get ahead of ourselves: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the second movie in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy. Ugh, TRILOGY. Can we talk about that for a moment? It's relevant to the movie anyway. 

    

     You see, when they announced that they were making a movie adaptation of the Hobbit I was really happy. I love the Lord of the Rings movies and book (I refer to it as ONE book, not three) so I couldn't wait to see what Peter Jackson would do. Then it became two movies which I thought was fair enough, they were adding extra content from the Appendices. But then they turned it into a trilogy, and so many of the problems with the first Hobbit movie are in The Desolation of Smaug as well: it's been stretched way too much. There's just so much stuff happening in the movie that doesn't advance the main plot which could have been significantly shortened. There were also some weird story segments which I won't go into for spoiler reasons but one scene seems to cause canonical issues with the LOTR Trilogy. Maybe it'll be fixed in the next movie, we'll see. The movie also ends on an exciting but frustrating cliffhanger but at least it'll give us the opening scene of the next movie to look forward to.

     On the technical side the movie looks great. I could sort of see the green screen in a couple of scenes and the CGI Goblins really sadden me (it's more expensive than the makeup they used in LOTR but looks worse, what's up with that?) but the rest of the movie looked great and Smaug was amazing. He is massive, incredibly detailed and looks just plain phenomenal. Benedict Cumberbatch's voice fits Smaug very well. They showed a few bits of the dragon in the trailers but trust me you have not *actually* seen him. 

    All in all, The Desolation of Smaug was a great movie but I'm still a bit disappointed with how much they're stretching the whole plot. I hope they can wrap things up neatly in There and Back Again.