The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

[A.T. Fish]

Just watched it. Much like the first one it was an entertaining adventure movie with stunning visuals that suffered a bit from being too long. The same problems people complained about in the first one are still present, such as the addition of new material, in this case a hard to buy romantic subplot, and an overextended climax. The pacing was better in this one though.

[Chuckman]

The pacing was better in this one though.

The pacing in Warhol's Sleep is better than the pacing in the first one. Jackson somehow managed to make a film that slavishly follows the plot of a briskly paced novel written for children and make it interminably long, and on top of that he got away with adding a bunch of superfluous "hey remember those Lord of the Rings movies" scenes.

I really, really like Tolkien, so I was hyped for the first one. I was shocked when it turned out to be one of the most aggressively terrible movies I have ever seen.

[hui43210]

It was an ok movie, but as an adaption of the Hobbit, it was terrible. One of my friends last night said it best, " man, can't wait for Hobbit 3: Legolas takes a shower.... For three hours".

They really tried to make it LOTR for some reason, the book was not as dark in tone as it made it out to be. The book also didn't have the dumbest love side plot I've seen in a while

[Trajan]

The fandom's wrath will be terrible, their retribution swift.

[Giji Shinka]

Good film with fantastic visual, bit of a cliche/corny story, not that great pacing and forced romantic subplot.

Also, to cliffhanger ending:

I'll give it a 6.8/10.

[Gendo'sPapa]

It wasn't a movie. It was a goddamn video game. Smaug was great when they stuck to the book.... then they dragged him out for another 40 minutes complete with a lava level.

Peter Jackson has lost it.

[Chuckman]

Lava. It's always the fucking lava. A once talented director gone to seed cannot resist the allure of fucking lava.

Maybe Jackson is making a cleverly disguised satire of the Star Wars prequels. The similarities are uncanny.

[FreakyFilmFan4ever]

Peter Jackson has lost it.

After watching King Kong and The Lovely Bones, I had a feeling LoTR was a very happy accident. So I went back and watched Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, Meet the Feebles, and Bad Taste, and my suspicions were confirmed. By all accounts LoTR shouldn't have been as good as it was, and The Hobbit was to be expected.

[Chuckman]

LOTR has all of the negative qualities of his other films, but its strengths and the scope of the work outweigh them. The terrible pacing and bloat in the Hobbit movies starts to show up in RotK.

I know the book had an extended denoument after the destruction of the ring but the movie didn't show that, it patted itself on the back for 45 minutes.

Also the Frighteners is a damn good movie even if the effects are dated.

[pikadourei]

Can't really say I was disappointed, with such low expectations of it.
Smaug was like a t-rex wyvern instead of a dragon. Pff.

Also I really love Bad Taste. It's the only Peter Jackson movie I really like. :P

[Reichu]

I'll inevitably be made to watch this for family movie night, after my mom's library gets their BD copy and she brings it home. I can easily wait until then, and would have happily waited until all three films were released and the much-improved fan edit hit BT. :p

[Stryker]

Whether or not it is good or bad, I'm probably going to enjoy it anyways.

[Sailor Star Dust]

I've seen and enjoyed LoTR (as well as reading The Hobbit/LoTR in my late high school/early college years), but hearing all the bad things about both Hobbit films has made me want to stay far away. Though a part of me is hopeful they're not as bad as they sound?

[Lavinius]

^Sorry, they're horrid. I hoped too...
And this is coming from someone who likes Dune 1984.

[Sailor Star Dust]

Welp, I guess it's best I just avoid them like the plague! At least LoTR was good, imo.

P.S: Jackson's Dead Alive / Braindead was...interesting, for lack of a better word. Watched it in one of my college film classes years ago. "I kick ass for the Lord!"

[Gendo'sPapa]

Peter Jackson pre-Lord of the Rings is a fascinating wunderkind director. Heavenly Creatures deserves tons of respect. The Lord of the Rings is an example of a big budget Hollywood production working as a work of universal entertainment.

But since LOTR Jackson has proceeded to crawl further & further up his own ass. Deep into the Mines of Moria. King Kong 2005 would have been great if it had just been a 100 minute adventure story about a goddamn giant ape. The Lovely Bones is a powerful & moving book about serious themes that Jackson somehow warped into a dull thriller with dead girls walking around in vampish costumes & Stanley Tucci playing every pedophile uncle stereotype rolled into one. (Though to be fair Tucci was fun in Bones but that's because he seemed to be the only thing Jackson cared about).

I enjoyed "An Unexpected Journey". Did it drag on too long? Yes. Did it often feel like a shoddy remake of "Fellowship of the Ring"? Absolutely. But the film had a decent structure - though once again every act is stretched to be three times longer than it needs to be so we can get 9 hours of movie - & some solid beats lifted straight from the book.

Plus the winning star of The Hobbit was casting Martin Freeman as Bilbo. He's legitimately perfect in the role & is easily my favorite Hobbit character to date. Thus the scene with Gollum in "An Unexpected Journey" is wonderfully entertaining to me.

Alas "The Desolation of Smaug" is just bad. It fails on every level as storytelling primarily because Jackson isn't telling a story. There are long stretches of The Hobbit Part II - I'm talking like up to a half hour at a time - where Bilbo doesn't say or do anything. Jackson stupidly writes the best part of his trilogy out of the movie. I think fucking Legolas - who is a joke mind you - has as much screen time as Bilbo does.

I could go on a rant here. How the whole damn thing feels disjointed & stuffed with shit that really should only be in the Extended Editions & is only in the theatrical cut to pad out the running time (Does the theatrical cut really need to stop cold for 10 minutes to tell us the political & social backstory of Lake Town?) . How the Dwarves go through all this shit to get the mountain, get there, come into a small problem & actually TURN BACK just so we add 5 more minutes of movie? How the hot dwarf suddenly makes sense because he's given a romance with the elf who likes short guys? Or how Gandalf fucks off so we can spend 30 minutes setting up The Lord of the Rings even though the story doesn't take place for another 60 years. Or how the movie comes alive for 10 minutes with Smaug then wastes him with a pretty brutal last half hour. (Thorin's master plan to take down Smaug is so ridiculous, offensively stupid & CG overloaded it's really one for the history books in bad writing). Or that ending. That lazy mid-action ending. It's just bad. It's a bad movie.

I'd love to see someone do a fan cut of The Hobbit trilogy when it's all over actually. One where they chop out all the shit Jackson & Co. threw up into the soup to pad it out to 9 hours. I'd say there's a pretty great 4 hour cut of The Hobbit that could be made. One that has all the spirit & joy of the book & tells the story justly. Hell, I think even if you cut out all the fluff the damn thing would cut together quite fluidly.

[Chuckman]

How the hot dwarf suddenly makes sense because he's given a romance with the elf who likes short guys?

What the fuck?

[Gendo'sPapa]

Yep. That subplot is especially egregious. It also takes up like 20 minutes of screen time. 20 minutes wasted on seeing the "Hot Dwarf" with zero dwarf features & a beard that's just a five o'clock shadow make goo-goo eyes at the chick from Lost. It's made even worse cause Legolas just pouts in the distance like some jilted lover. Laughably bad.

More so than anything I've ever seen in a movie EVER have I had the sick feeling that I was watching an elaborate & expensive bit of "fan fiction".

[Reichu]

Humanity needs to find a way to travel to parallel universes just so that the version of The Hobbit directed by Guillermo del Toro can be recovered.

[Shinoyami65]

Wait wait wait Jackson added a love subplot? No. No. No.

Also, which dwarf is Hot Dwarf? As far as I can tell from reading the original book they were all of equal ugliness.

I'd still probably see it anyway, though, if it means I get to eat popcorn. Although just for reference would you rate this over Catching Fire, because that and Hobbit are my two movie options right now (two movie adaptations of books; this truly is a rock and a hard place scenario).