Keelhaul

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2014)

This film is marginally an improvement over the first because now we're building to something, the dragon is a bit further down the path across the lake, the necromancer. It's still padded but we make that contact, have the encounter so we don't feel like we completely wasted our time and money.
The same deep-seated flaws persist on this path. We don't actually inhabit a world, only the semblance of one. The resemblance to a world or history only there because the external mythology and heroic posturing has been amplified in place of narrative depth. But it has no consequence.
When the dwarf leader near the end gives a rousing speech in Laketown about how they're going to take back the old kingdom under the mountain and how riches will flow and a crowd cheers him on as liberator; I can choose to ignore the emptiness of its epic sentiment, its lack of world, at the consequence of numbing that part of me that expects to grapple with a fuller sense of things. It's what we all do when we 'turn our brain off' with a film like this.. We numb.
We're left with one rousing spectacle after another and here's where the lack of world appears in a different light, more interesting because it's tied directly to the cinematic eye which is the most fundamental question in film.
There's a cinematic evolution afoot bringing us a step closer to immersion. It's currently spearheaded by Malick's philosophy of the eye, and 3D and computer landscaping in the nuts and bolts. Twenty years down the road I expect the first full integration of the two in films other than demo reels of destruction, serious films that take their place in the space leading up to the eye.
Cuaron, Del Toro, Lee, even Snyder try to be a part of this advance. Nolan is tweaking with mechanics of narrative, a different sort of advance. Jackson, like Tarantino and Burton, isn't bothered to be a part of it. He was a toymaker when he started out, still is, but now, like Cameron, the toymaker's sensibility has shifted from contraptions to the overall world.
You'll see all over this that he favors a video-game camera which takes up usually arbitrary movements in space, vertical or lateral. It feels unnatural and clunky because it is not tied to or derived from the movement of any of the elements in motion, it is digitally imposed after the fact as navigation. It is an artificial, non-human eye.
We do have some mildly attracting sculpting in the river escape from the elftown, but even this is ruined by other decisions like surfing Legolas. Overall it feels stale and tiresome, a huge tinkertoy mechanism.