Monday, December 30, 2013

The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug



After a five year hiatus from this blog I've decided to restart it.  I need to get back in the habit of writing and this will be part of that process.  Since I have five years of backlog material, I should not run out of material for quite some time.

Onto the review:

I first read the Hobbit when I was around 10 years old.  Unlike most of Tolkien's works, this is a book I can reread and do so every five to ten years.  I should do an accompanying review of "The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey," and I might someday, but for now I will simply state that I thought it was "Just OK."  It met my criterion of "Was I Entertained," but not much more (though I will reference it for contrast many times).

So going into seeing the second part of the Hobbit trilogy I had some preconceptions:
  • I knew this would stray from the book.
  • I knew parts of the Silmarillion would be included.
  • I knew there would be new material.
  • I was not going to see the movie in 3D.  This will be another post/rant, but for a later day.
The rest I figured I would sit back and let the movie happen.

As with "An Unexpected Journey," I took exception to some of the changes Peter Jackson made.  Some parts of the material he bypassed were favorites of mine.  Given the changes in the first movie, I was not surprised by the alterations to Beorn's scene, but it left me with a slightly bitter taste to begin the movie. 

With that said, I'm going to avoid spoilers as much as possible, not because I think they are a surprise, but rather that I endeavor to keep my reviews spoiler free.

Let's start with acting.  I don't think anyone has any expectation that any of the actors in these movies will be awarded recognition as I'm not sure Peter Jackson knows how to tell a character driven story such that the actors are pushed in their craft.  The acting in this movie was actually a pleasant surprise, mostly due to the new written material.

The writing on the movie was interesting.  As I stated earlier, there were parts that were omitted that I whole heartedly disagree with.  And, while there are new additions I felt did not need to be included (Radagast being an obvious choice,) some of the new material is very enjoyable.  Kili becomes more than just the nephew of Thorin and Bard becomes a character of depth that gives a foundation for where he will wind up in the third movie (presuming it is not changed from the book).

While I'm not quite convinced that we needed a potential love triangle as a way of pushing Legolas into the movie, I actually liked the addition of Tauriel because, let's face it, Tolkien did not write a lot of female characters and having an elf who doesn't conform to their societal constraints is a fun idea.  I also found Evangaline Lilly's Tauriel much more likeable than Liv Tyler's whiny Arwen from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  

Next up is pacing.  "An Unexpected Journey" was horribly paced.  "Desolation of Smaug" was well paced for the most part.  Some of this goes back to the writing, some of it is we needed less exposition to introduce people and part of it was this felt like a movie with a purpose.  "Desolation of Smaug" found the story it was trying to tell and stuck to the tone.  There were many moments in the film where it could have fallen into the "I don't know if I want to be serious, a comedy or an adventure film," trap that I felt its predecessor did.  This film is, for the most part, a serious adventure film that, even in its slower sections does not lose sight of the end product.  Granted the film has much more action to it, mostly due to the source material, but none of it felt forced.

One place where I felt the film fell down was in camera work and CG.  There were more than a few moments in the film where the establishing shot was off angle, or zoomed out and then the camera view rotates in and centers.  I know this is a stylistic choice by Peter Jackson, but I hate it.  It feels like someone is playing with the 3D cameras that James Cameron created for "Avatar" and hasn't quite figured out how to use them yet.  I'm also not a fan of Jackson's aerial shots to establish perspective on a line of people walking/riding.  I understand he's using this to establish time passage in the journey but I'm really tired of them.  

My final concern about the camera work is Jackson's insistence of reusing shots.  I'm not sure if there hasn't been a movie in the five which have taken place in Middle Earth where a character presses themselves against something to hide themselves from whatever is hunting them. I get that it's a bread and butter shot for Jackson, but it's over used at this point and has started dragging me out of the tension in the scene because it feels like we've done this all before.

As for the CG, I'm not sure if it's a style choice or what but I felt really let down by a lot of the CG in this movie. Don't get me wrong, Smaug himself was beautifully done, however even he felt like he was CG.  I compare the effects from this movie to those of "Pacific Rim" and they aren't even close.  Too often in this film, when presented with CG rendered scenes they felt very artificial.  An example would be molten metal. As it flowed, it looked like someone was rendering it on a computer without thought to anything but the metal itself.  We should have seen heat waves coming up in layers, but we didn't.  And that made the CG both obvious and flat to me.

It does make me wish that Del Toro had stayed as director of the Hobbit films as I suspect the CG and direction issues I have would have been nullified.   

To balance out the above issues, I will say that, though Legolas and Tauriel's fighting style is a direct rehash of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the action in the movie is handled very well.  Jackson has always gone for a character focused action sequence, where Von Clausewitz's fog of war is mostly ignored as the action is centered on the character in the here and now and not even considering the big picture. In "Desolation" it works very well. 

One final thought:  "Desolation of Smaug" sets up the final movie very well.  We are going to get hammered with some serious action in the final installment of this trilogy and while I have concerns that Jackson will "Forest Gump" the end of the last movie the way he did with "Return of the King," (my "Forest Gump" reference is my opinion that a movie should have ended 15-20 minutes earlier but tacked on two to three scenes that didn't necessarily have to be there and could have been ending scenes on their own).

Overall I was entertained by "Desolation of Smaug,"and in such a manner that I didn't feel the need to spend a lot of time picking it apart afterward as I did with "An Unexpected Journey."