Jackson Looked Too Long into the Palantir and Sauron Stole His Brain

Rating: 1/10 (15 January 2014)

What to say about this godawful mess of a film?!!! I'm simply agog (or is that Azog?).
When he directed LOTR, Jackson trimmed down an abundance of material to create a gorgeous film experience. His LOTR was by no means exactly the book, but it worked as a cinematic experience of Tolkien's masterpiece. Beautiful, moving, funny, thrilling, profound and elegiac.
With this film, he's done the EXACT opposite. He's taken an enchanting, funny, thrilling story and inexplicably either cut all the fun moments out of it or overloaded them until they become dull and obvious. When not doing that he's busy glopping it up and weighing it down with elements from LOTR or the appendices or just crap pulled out of thin air as far as I can tell. It's hard to fathom that it was directed by the same person. Sloppy storytelling, dull, repetitive, messy to look at for the most part and, unbelievably, boring. Most disappointing, is that the film is practically un-Tolkien. I wasn't a big fan of the first film, but aside from the huge misstep of putting Orcs into it, I liked it for the most part. Desolation of Smaug, however, is irredeemable.
I guess one of the most fantastic coming-of-"middle-age" stories in English literature wasn't enough for Jackson and his crew. They didn't care to make The Hobbit. They preferred instead to make a movie that should be titled: "A Goddamned Bunch of Stoopid Orcs Swarming Around and Getting Killed for 3 Hours and Other Crap That Has Absolutely Nothing to do with Bilbo Baggins and His Journey There and Back Again."