An hour into part two of The Hobbit, an unrelenting sense of sameness begins to set in.
It is not a testament to director Peter Jackson’s coherent world-building that nearly everything in The Desolation of Smaug save its titular dragon comes to seem overfamiliar; rather, without a compelling story by Tolkien to follow devoutly and proportionally, the Middle Earth film universe is just an overtly repetitive pattern of close encounters and mythic symbolism.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug 
Directed by Peter Jackson. |
Finally in sight of the Lonely Mountain, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and the company of dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) must contend with inimical elves, a giant shape-shifter, the human citizens of Laketown, and their usual orc foes before entering the dwarven kingdom of Erebor to confront Smaug himself (Benedict Cumberbatch) in pursuit of the Arkenstone which will affirm Thorin’s kingship.
Luckily for the dwarves, Smaug is more bark than bite; when he arrives in the last hour, grumpy and growling, he is so ineffectual even in his fury, singeing dwarf posteriors with blasts of flame, that it is hard not to see a point being made unwittingly of the dragon’s impotence. (Spoiler alert, for the sake of sparing disappointment: Smaug does not die in this movie.)
Despite a few ripe opportunities, the adventuring dwarves make no reprise of their “Song of the Lonely Mountain.” And just as the action, lacking a memorable central climax (say, a Battle of Helm’s Deep), tends to feel low-stakes and dangerously generic, Howard Shore’s musical score fails to leave an impression for the first time in what is now more than a dozen hours within the New Zealand-Middle Earth universe.
It is a product of being neither a beginning nor an ending: new themes emerge for Smaug and Laketown, and motifs introduced in Fellowship still linger, reinforcing plot connections to the Lord of the Rings trilogy – viewers who have never read the books will learn about Gimli’s parentage in a well-placed moment of dwarf comedy, and even fans of Tolkien’s major works will find new, apocryphal tidbits in Jackson’s generous padding.
But the sheer directionless variety of the music, in which nothing predominates, is a symptom of the fact that this is not truly Tolkien’s work, though it bears the same name and undoubtedly has its heart in the right place; it is a full trilogy of would-be epics, inflated from what was originally to be a two-part adaptation (under the direction of Guillermo Del Toro), which would already have required substantial additions to Tolkien’s 300-page children’s tale.
The absence of series heavyweights Hugo Weaving, Christopher Lee, Ian Holm and Andy Serkis is felt deeply – while Cate Blanchett sees her role as the elven Lady Galadriel reduced almost literally to a whisper in this chapter – and Benedict Cumberbatch’s motion-capture dragon, however endlessly, talkatively threatening, cannot fill the gap.
Nor can Stephen Fry, appearing as Master of Laketown, a role that, so far, founders between bureaucratic parody and complete pointlessness, though it comes with its own clone of Grima Wormtongue in the form of Alfrid (Ryan Gage), a lackey so painstakingly “conniving” that adjective surely appeared in the script.
Stealing scenes is reserved for Lee Pace as Legolas’s father, the xenophobic isolationist Thranduil, haughty king of the Mirkwood elves, who denied assistance to the dwarves of Erebor after Smaug’s arrival – glimpsed at the beginning of An Unexpected Journey – and now imprisons the dwarf travellers rather than grant them safe passage.
Their escape sets in motion a chase along a rushing river – dwarves pursued by orcs, pursued by elves – which is the film’s largest set-piece and its energetic high-water mark. But then the company encounters Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) and enters Laketown, and again the film is hamstrung by its subordination to arcs longer than it is, because only in next year’s There and Back Again will the groundwork being laid amount to anything.
In fact, by the end of Desolation, not a single prolific antagonist has been laid low, even though their number increases yet again when Thorin’s arch-nemesis, Azog the Pale Orc (Manu Bennett), delegates a different, computerized-looking fellow to lead the dwarf hunt so he himself can return to the lair of the ascendant Necromancer (Benedict Cumberbatch again), who is laying traps for Gandalf.
Either as a film or as the middle instalment in a trilogy, The Desolation of Smaug leaves a lot to be desired, especially in comparison with the likes of The Two Towers, which happens to feature nearly identical story arcs for Gandalf and an elven Juliet.
Then it was Arwen, now it’s Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a character original to the film adaptation who suffices deftly in the orc-killing department – keeping pace with the returning Legolas (Orlando Bloom) – but stops the story in its tracks when she begins trading affections with Kili (Aidan Turner), the dwarves’ archer and stubbled approximation of a looker, in a contrived facsimile of the love story between Aragorn and Arwen.
While it succeeds as diversionary fare – as any imaginable story of Middle Earth told by Peter Jackson surely would – The Desolation of Smaug amounts to little more than a generic special-effects extravaganza.