Truly Unpleasant

Rating: 4/10 (21 December 2013)

Overall, I liked An Unexpected Journey much less than the original Lord of the Rings movies, which were, to be fair, fantastic. This second installment began promisingly, but it declined quickly, and had the same serious issues that the first did.
There are pluses to this film, and I want to acknowledge them. Mirkwood was well done, and although I initially criticized the use of CGI for a forest, it in fact helped create the atmosphere of the forest. The midbending element of the forest's magic was a very interesting addition, and the spiders were great. The character Bard was a very good addition as well, and provided a much better protagonist than the greedy and arrogant Thorin. Laketown was well done and just as I imagined it. Erebor and Smaug were both well portrayed.
However, The Desolation of Smaug had difficulty, like the first, establishing what sort of mood and tone to set. It jumps from dark shots of the carcasses of slain dwarfs in Erebor to scenes of Disney-like battle choreography. The fight scenes in this film tend to be much goofier but also significantly more graphic and violent. In Mirkwood, there is a "funny" scene where the dwarfs gather around a spider and pull its legs off. Another time, an orc is catapulted up to a balcony, which provides a humorous setup, but Legolas follows up with a disgusting beheading that left an uncomfortable silence in the theater. Peter Jackson can't seem to reconcile the silliness of the children's book and the darkness he established in Lord of the Rings.
Peter Jackson also utilizes the same sort of situations that appear in Lord of the Rings and bring into question his versatility and originality as a writer. There are far too many times when one of the characters (whose voices are without exception deep and somber) will look into the distance and say something like "darkness is growing" or "there is yet hope." These meaningless clichés are thrown around so frequently that there is little time left for meaningful dialogue. The script hits rock bottom when someone says to Thorin, "the dragon will kill you," and Thorin replies, ever so articulately and cleverly, "not if I kill it first." Jackson's main antagonist through most of the film is, yet again, Sauron, and new characters always warn the company about the growing threat of the Necromancer. It begins to sound tiresomely like the Lord of the Rings all over again. There are numerous other instances of repeated conflicts and character archetypes like the "it is not our fight" argument between races, the conniving, deceitful king's adviser, the character who nearly dies in combat but watches, in slow motion and in silence, someone come to their aid, the shot of a character climbing over yet another enormous ancient statue engraved into a mountain (the Secret Doorway my ass), etc.
A serious issue is the character Kili and his love situation with Tauriel. Kili becomes important in this film, and in fact becomes the object of affection of the new strong female character Tauriel. I do not object to the introduction of Tauriel - the story is undoubtedly dominated by men, but Tauriel's love for Kili is laughable. There is no believability or emotion there, and when Kili is poisoned by a Morgul blade (sound familiar? Apparently they are not so rare), no one cares. And no one in the audience cares to see the action of the climax interrupted by scenes of her healing him.
There are multiple other instances of nonsense and stupidity in the editing and writing of this film, but they are too numerous to list here. Instead I will detail to you the Desolation of Peter Jackson upon Smaug.
The movie begins to careen off of the tracks about five minutes after Bilbo enters the Lonely Mountain, and it crashes and burns in the final minutes. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch both performed very well together, as Biblo desperately tries to flatter the probing and arrogant Smaug into letting him live. But then Peter Jackson took some creative liberties with the story that ultimately made no sense and destroyed the film. The dwarfs enter too, and they lead Smaug on a merry goose-chase, and the dragon is apparently incapable of keeping track of more than one group of dwarfs. It is embarrassing and stomach- churning to watch Smaug bumble after the scurrying dwarfs. When they finally lead Smaug down to the forges (where they obviously have the best chance of escape), they trick him into lighting them, and they pour molten gold into carven rivulets. The dragon is still struggling to detain his pesky intruders, when he finally corners Bilbo and several of the dwarfs at the end of a hall. But they're standing on some large stone structure, which they tear apart to reveal an enormous cast gold statue of a dwarf. Smaug gazes at it greedily, but then the eye of the dwarf pops out and the statue melts and Smaug nearly drowns in the boiling metal. This bizarre and completely senseless ending put the nail in the coffin of this hopeless movie. And it was the last thing that happened before the abrupt ending, which cuts the movie with a "what have we done?" by poor little Bilbo. Right, you are, Bilbo.