I am, perhaps, the only geek among my geeky high school friends who didn’t read the Tolkien books. I never read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I never read The Hobbit. Perhaps this was because the person who introduced me to them insisted I begin by reading The Silmarillion (the encyclopedic reference work spelling out the mythology and history of Tolkien’s works) first.
So: I’m not one of those pale, bespectacled, and dour folk who are posting missives like “Legolas, son of Thranduil doesn’t even appear in The Hobbit!” and “You can’t just go adding characters like Turiel the She-elf!” in online forums today. Instead, I’m a frequent movie-goer who happened to find himself in a movie theater last night, watching the 3D Regal VIP Experience version of The Hobbit on the silver screen.
For all the frantic action (and, indeed, the newly minted Turiel the She-elf and the out-of-place Legolas seem to have been added mostly to crank up the action), The Desolation of Smaug is a dull and unsatisfying picture.
Oh, the barrel ride down a raging river is a splendid set-piece (in a cartoony kind of way). The vistas of Middle Earth are jaw-dropping (though it would be hard for them not to be, given the jaw-dropping New Zealand vistas they’re based on). The giant spiders are sufficiently creepy-crawly. And Smaug, the dragon, is menacingly voiced and splendidly animated — a creature who seems gigantic and serpentine and weightless and coiling and sinister and smart and greedy and bipolar all at once (as dragons, I suppose, should be).
Unfortunately, all this barrel-riding, orc-slaying, spider-killing action does not a good story make, and we are left, like the characters themselves, plodding from confrontation to confrontation with no real connection to or identification with the people who are supposed to be our heroes. Worse, the ending — which I will not reveal — elicited catcalls and hisses from the modest crowd who viewed it with us last night … all of whom seemed to share my personal displeasure at having been flirted with for a good three hours — but then left abruptly, without so much as a kiss on the doorstep, when the date came to an end.
In a nutshell: the latest chapter in the Hobbit trilogy will make goo-gobs of money from ticket, merchandising, and theme park ride sales, and, in that sense, it will be a success. But as a story, it take too many liberties with the text to please fans of the book … and offers too little in the way of character development to engage the casual viewer.
Photo by Courtesy of Warner Bros. Picture – © 2013 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc
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