In The Desolation of Smaug, the second Hobbit instalment, Peter Jackson takes an unfortunate page from Spielberg’s book.
USA/New Zealand
3*
Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie
Running time: 160 minutes
This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Battle of the Five Armies
When the first film in the Hobbit trilogy was released, everyone kept talking about the disproportionate length of the films (totalling around nine hours) compared with the size of the source text, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 300-page novel. If War and Peace could be made into a three-hour film, what prevented Jackson from producing a film length commensurate with the size of his story?
It doesn’t take an outsized intellect to recognise financial considerations playing an important role here, and one would expect that, if anyone could entertain us for such an extended period of time, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson would be the man for the job. But just as The Hobbit precedes the story contained in The Lord of the Rings, so too does this current batch of films seem to be the work of a much less experienced director.
Because this second instalment of The Hobbit, titled The Desolation of Smaug, is the second film of a three-part series, we cannot have expected there to be much to get excited about, as it functions mostly as a bridge between the first and last parts of the story. But the same was true of the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, and yet Jackson used majestic battle scenes and spectacular locations to his advantage to keep our attention.
Very little happens in Smaug, at least until the very end, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarfs reach the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), where Smaug the dragon has lain in a chamber full of gold ever since he chased out the dwarfs, to whose kingdom he had laid waste. For the most part, we are on a journey with the dozen characters as they travel through Mirkwood Forest, arrive at Lake-town thanks to a complicated and conflicted widower and cross Long Lake to Erebor, where Bilbo is charged with stealing the Arkenstone gem from Smaug. On a parallel track, we see Gandalf the Grey’s realisation that he and his companions are up against something much more evil than they had anticipated.
But our unease with this film has as much to do with the thin storyline – once more spread over some two hours and 40 minutes – as it does with the embarrassingly amateurish presentation of romance onscreen.
We can all remember the weepy relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Return of the King; in Smaug, the focus is on Kíli the Dwarf (Aidan Turner), the nephew of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a female elf from Mirkwood who is the object of Elven Prince Legolas’ affections. In the film, at any rate, Kíli certainly stands out among his band of brothers as he is the only dwarf without a beard, and when he and his fellow dwarfs are taken prisoner by Elvenking Thranduil, Legolas’ father, he immediately hits it off with Tauriel.
This initial attraction, in no way hidden, will quickly lead to the two swooning over each other. Jackson, for all his filmmaking prowess, simply cannot resist the temptation to go melodramatic on us. When Kíli is struck by a poisoned arrow in the thigh, it is up to Tauriel to rub the healing herb into his flesh while intoning a spell, and when Kíli looks up at her, would you believe, she seems to shimmer with a blinding angelic light. It is difficult not to laugh, as we get unfortunate flashbacks to the worst film in the Jackson canon, his calamitous The Lovely Bones from 2009.
Jackson’s camera also flies all over the place, often making us nauseous when a wild helicopter shot is inserted between much calmer visuals. For the director, it would seem that “coverage” implies catapulting his machinery in every direction and using that footage whenever he needs to cut away from someone for a brief moment. Reckless track-ins, especially in one of the opening scenes, in the Prancing Pony inn in Bree, are also tiresome because their use speaks to Jackson’s apparent inability to come up with creative solutions to creating tension – in this case, to suggest the potential dangers around Thorin.
One truly adventurous scene, however, occurs during the dwarfs’ escape from Mirkwood: At one point, the camera seems to be floating on the wild river and pans from side to side as one of the dwarfs rolls around in a barrel, mowing down the Orcs on the riverbank as he careers full-speed across the river bends. It is a breathtakingly choreographed bit of action, all in a single take, thoroughly reminiscent of the epic single-take chase scene in the Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg–directed The Adventures of Tintin.
Smaug may be Bilbo’s tale, but it belongs entirely to the titular dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is much more clever than he appears to be, and while he certainly poses a threat to the existence of all in Middle-earth – and the glint in his eye looks almost exactly like Sauron – we cannot help but respect his intelligence and even his wiliness, and Cumberbatch’s work here is mesmerizing.
While Smaug isn’t at the same level as Jackson’s three films from the beginning of the millennium, and despite the often amateurish representation of romance or infatuation, it is certainly an improvement on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and time goes by more quickly (that might be because the film is nearly 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor).
Unfortunately, Bilbo is not as active as we would like him to be, and he all but completely disappears from view in the Lake-town scenes. After we had lost Gandalf in The Two Towers, he reappeared towards the end with reinforcements at Helm’s Deep and provided one of the most memorable moments of that extraordinary film. But by the end of Smaug, Bilbo has done so little that we forget about him, and the film literally leaves him hanging – in a cage at Dol Guldur, where he discovers the Necromancer.
The Desolation of Smaug showcases little of the imagination we have come to associate with Jackson and his previous depictions of Middle-earth. At times Spielbergian with his sentimentality, here he rarely awes us with the breadth of his vision. The scenes with Bilbo or Smaug – and especially with the two of them – are marvellous, and so is an early scene with giant spiders, but overall it would seem Jackson has lost his Midas touch.