A few brief spoilery notes on The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

[coyotegoth]

1) Overall, I like the storytelling rather better than in the first film: much less egregious fan service (Elijah Wood and Ian Holm, much as I <3 you both, I'm looking at you here; also, CC: Sylvester McCoy). The first film had many such moments which, while often delightful on their own, didn't do the pacing of that 3-hour film any favors. Many of this film's more fan service-y moments were genuinely funny (Legolas insulting the picture of young Gimli; amusing in context (WTF is with the carrot thing, Peter Jackson?), or even somewhat potentially touching (Evangeline Lilly and Kili: to be titled This Will Not End Well. Also, that one moment when she's healing Kili with the etholas, and she begins to glow like she's radioactive? PERHAPS A BIT MUCH.)

2) There's an interesting moment where Smaug refers to the ring as "precious" during Bilbo's visit to the cave, and it responds by falling off of Bilbo's finger... thereby leaving him visible during the entire exchange with Smaug (greatly protracted here, with the dwarves getting in on the fun and using the forges of the mountain to combat Smaug(!) in ways that contain so much handwavy physics, I nearly sprained something). The Bilbo part of this isn't bad: it's rather amusing that Smaug would be able to see Bilbo, and still refrain from killing him due to vanity (and, later, a desire to have Bilbo see what's going to happen to the Lake people).

Still, I think it might be interesting if, say, Bilbo had dropped the ring, and it bounces down the hill of coins, finally coming to rest on a tapestry or something downslope from Bilbo (ie, something where he might conceivably pick it out visually, as opposed to its landing on the mountains of gold coins). Since Bilbo has absolutely no reason to want to be visible to Smaug, his scrambles to recapture the ring as Smaug advances could be used profitably to build suspense.

3) Nice conversation between Gandalf and Thorin at the beginning; nice to see you've read The Quest of Erebor, Gandalf.

4) Speaking of the big G, this whole hooraw with him and Sauron at Dol Goldur is going somewhere, right?

5) Given Legolas's acrobatics here (especially with the dwarves' escape with the barrels), I don't understand how Helm's Deep went down: assuming Legolas is a fairly representative specimen, that would have been like having your army joined by a hundred River Tams.

6) Whoa- Thorin freely offers to share the dwarves' gold with the Lake people? I guess they're doing this to punch up the idea of the Arkenstone being the source of all greed-related problems, or something...?



TL;DR- better than the first one; this entire series should have been about half the length, with less of the kinetic battles and angsty backstory, and more Bilbo.

Comments

[arethinn]

(Evangeline Lilly and Kili: to be titled This Will Not End Well. Also, that one moment when she's healing Kili with the etholas, and she begins to glow like she's radioactive? PERHAPS A BIT MUCH.)

Not related perhaps to some similar glowing by Arwen, which itself I suppose was reference to Frodo seeing Glorfindel "as he is upon the other side" or some such in "Flight to the Ford"? (Haven't seen DoS yet; don't worry about spoilers.)

TL;DR- better than the first one; this entire series should have been about half the length, with less of the kinetic battles and angsty backstory, and more Bilbo.

Yeah, that's kind of what I worried about when I first heard this was going to be 3 movies. I know prose can take a lot of screen time to film thoroughly, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right to do so, and it doesn't seem to even be what PJ's done (film as literally as possible). I would be less bothered with length if there were less new invention, I think.

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

If I'm remembering the book correctly (a dicey assumption given how long it's been), the original plot needs only about 20-30 minutes more movie time to finish! I'm beginning to think they're going about making a trilogy of that relatively small book the wrong way. If they'd skipped the scene with Frodo at the beginning, and the Gandalf-vs-Sauron thing, and possibly Radagast, they'd have had the whole story in two movies. IIRC there's very little mention of Dol Guldur or Sauron/Necromancer in the book, and neither of them had anything to do with the quest to retake Erebor.

I'm beginning to suspect some serious mistakes were made...