Desolation Row

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2015)

After being carted away by "The Eagles are Coming!", our troop is still playing Hide and Seek with Azog's Orc-Pack.
But we have to have a Flashback First. Once again we see Peter Jackson walking around Bree with a Carrot in his mouth. In "The Fellowship of the Ring" we met his daughter as one of the cute little Hobbit kids. This time, she is a "Butterbur" (The Ostlers of "The Prancing Pony"), carting tankards of Ale to Thorin and Gandalf, one year earlier. Just look for the girl that looks like Peter Jackson. Here is talked about Thrain's Disappearance, Thorin's father- Who wielded the last of the Seven Dwarf Rings. As Gandalf tells Thorin, they would need a Burglar...
Fade to Bilbo spying on Azog's pack, and he sees a huge Bear. Gandalf tells him this Bear might be an Ally, he will either help them - Or kill them.
So they take refuge in a House, Gandalf not telling them it's The Bear's house, until The Bear is chasing them into it. The Bear is "Beorn" (Mikael Persbrandt), and it just so happens that he hates Orcs and Goblins more than Dwarfs - So they have a temporary Ally.
This film had a lot of the things I was waiting to see, Mirkwood, The Spiders, and the Wood-Elves Kingdom. Lee Pace is Thranduil, Legolas' Father. It just makes Sense that Legolas is there, and if he were true to character, he would have helped the band of Dwarfs just like he helped Aragorn and Gimli. Peter Jackson creates a She-Elf out of thin- air, "Tauriel" (Evangeline Lilly) who is very Elf. I don't have any trouble with this either, she neither adds nor takes away anything, and gives us something very pretty to look at. But she only has eyes for Fili, much to Legolas' Chagrin.
Since The Hobbit was written as if Bilbo wrote it, these little facts and characters didn't need to be written in, so it's up to us to fill in the blanks, with Jackson's help. And Tauriel is very much an Elf, displaying many of the powers that Arwen had.
While the Dwarfs plus Bilbo get "wrapped up" in Mirkwood, Gandalf has to go to the High Fells of Rhudaur. This is part of the back-story of the Witch King of Angmar, the leader of the Ring-Wraiths.
These two stories get told side-by-side for the rest of this film and beginning of the last, much the same way Lord of the Rings told up to five stories at once, we have the Orcs - Azog and Bolg, who is introduced here, summoning Azog to Dul Goldur. We have the Wood-Elves Kingdom, we have Laketown, and the bargeman Bard's (Luke Evans) relationship with the Master of Laketown, and his history, Evans also plays Bard's ancestor Girion, the archer who shot the Black Arrows at Smaug at Dale and missed, but in fact causing a chink in Smaug's armor, to be abused by Bard 60 years later. Laketown creates the opportunity for many characters and interactions to take shape.
But mainly, the Dwarfs get to Erebor on Durin's Day, even though their party has been split up, Kili and some others left at Laketown, where Bolg attacks, giving Orlando Bloom the opportunity to be Action Hero again. It seems that Legolas has the Skill to kill Bolg (Lawrence Makaore, who was the Witch King in Return of the King), just not the luck to do it this time.
We finally get to see the Whole Smaug this time, not just his nostril or eye. This is one of the best Dragons of Film, CGI or Not, almost as good as the Dragon from the early 80's film "Dragonslayer".
Some of the interaction between Smaug and the Dwarfs is expanded a bit, but in the end, Smaug smells Laketown on Bilbo and flies off for retribution. But not before he gets to take a kind of Swim and gets a shiny new coat...
If "An Unexpected Journey" hinted at many of the things to come, "Desolation of Smaug" gets into the details much more, further connecting this trilogy to the "second" one. In a way, I wish this trilogy had been made first, or that less time had been between the two. That way the reaction to this one would have been less jaded.
When it comes to film, what do people want? Three more Expendables films? More Schwarzenegger films? I think this era's moviegoers, well they may be fine - But it is all of these Internet Eberts who create 50 IMDb accounts, just to try to scrag the ratings of one film, that ruin the enjoyment of the people who went to see it. And if you check the join date of every bad review or 1-star rating, you'll see it was "One Day Ago" - And I'll bet they pirated a copy of it just to watch it - If they watched it at all, which I doubt.