Peter Jackson needs an editor.
According to the sacred text that is Wikipedia, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was edited by Jabez Olssen, who
previously worked with Jackson on The
Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, King
Kong, The Lovely Bones and the
first installment of the Hobbit
trilogy, so maybe that familiarity is part of the problem. Either way, it’s not
exactly controversial to point out that The
Desolation of Smaug is way too effing long. When calculated, the average
length of this year’s ten blockbusters (DoS,
Iron Man 3, Star Trek into Darkness, Man
of Steel, Fast and Furious 6, Pacific Rim, Elysium, Ender’s Game, Thor: The Dark World and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) comes
out to 131 minutes. At a whopping 161 minutes, The Desolation of Smaug is by far the longest of the bunch – a full
15 minutes longer than its closest competitor, Catching Fire.
The funny thing is that (again,
according to Wikipedia) it’s also 17 minutes shorter than The Fellowship of the Ring, the shortest entry in its series, but I
didn’t feel nearly as drained after AMC’s Lord
of the Rings marathon last December – the extended editions, no less – as I
did when the credits rolled for Desolation
of Smaug. Long story short, the problem isn’t the running time itself so
much as what the filmmaker does with that time. No matter how much extra
material you try to tack on, The Hobbit
simply doesn’t have as much substance as The
Lord of the Rings; there’s no way you can stretch a single 300-page
children’s book out into three almost-three-hour movies without them feeling
bloated. That’s not to say I don’t understand the temptation. After all, once
you’ve seen Lord of the Rings come to
vivid, awe-inspiring life onscreen, The
Hobbit seems rather unimpressive and trivial, and all writers know what
it’s like to grow too attached to their work to sacrifice any of it (not that
that stopped them from cutting Tauriel’s backstory). But you can’t help but
wonder what The Hobbit would be like
if Jackson and co. had stuck with their original plan of just splitting it into
two parts. The plot would’ve been more streamlined, with perhaps less
portentous foreboding and needless set-up; the narrative arcs would be more
distinct; and the action scenes would sustain their momentum the whole way
through instead of starting with a burst of electricity and petering out toward
the finish line, as though Jackson has forgotten how to end a battle since he
completed The Return of the King.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of
the way, I can say something that might seem totally out-of-left-field: I liked
The Desolation of Smaug. Not in a
pretentious, backhanded “oh, it’s better than the first one” kind of way,
though at least for me, it was. I genuinely enjoyed
it. To be fair, it started out rather slow, but by the half-hour mark, when the
elves were introduced and something resembling an actual plot began to form, I
found myself becoming engrossed in this fantasy world and the characters in a
way that never happened with its predecessor.
I liked the sense of humor, which
was goofy but subtler than in Unexpected
Journey (if Legolas’s reaction to seeing a picture of Gloin’s son doesn’t
make you crack a smile… I have nothing to say to you). I liked the barrel set
piece, which had a sense of fun inventiveness that managed to keep the child
inside me amused, and on the whole, the action was a definite improvement over
the generic sequences in the first Hobbit
movie, even though the climax in particular seemed to go on forever. I liked
how it emphasized the distinction between the Mirkwood elves and those featured
in The Lord of the Rings and how the
filmmakers even superficially delved into the politics of Laketown, a place
unlike the majestic or picturesque places we usually see in Middle-Earth (I
suppose most likely, none of that appeals to anyone who isn’t a hardcore
fantasy fan and couldn’t care less about world-building, but whatever, that’s
their loss). I liked Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel so much that I didn’t even mind
the awkward love triangle. Most of all, I liked Benedict Cumberbatch’s Smaug,
an awesome sight to behold (especially on IMAX), so well-realized by WETA
Workshop that you can feel the
texture of his scales, and the menacing villain so sorely missed in Unexpected Journey (Gollum doesn’t count,
since he only appeared for about ten minutes of the movie).
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