The Desolation of Smaug (Spoiler Free)

Rating: 4/10 (23 December 2013)

I got back from seeing the midnight premiere of The Desolation of Smaug. In all honesty, I thought the movie, down to its core, was bad.
I came into it with pretty subdued expectations, having not taken well to the previous installment An Unexpected Journey (2012), but TDOS reached a new low. This is probably Peter Jackson's weakest directorial effort, even more so than the disastrous Lovely Bones.
The movie is essentially a CGI cartoon, implementing laugh out loud action sequences and special effects. The pacing is sluggish and disjointed. About 30 minutes in, I found myself taken out of the experience completely, trying to guess where the movie would end.
Martin Freeman gives another wonderful performance as Bilbo Baggins, but is severely underused, being more or less shuffled into the fold of events.
Aesthetically, it is hard to believe that this movie is grounded in the same Middle Earth seen in Jackson's Lord of The Rings trilogy. This interpretation of Middle Earth is bright, and lacks physical depth and any sort of fantasy realism. Visually, it looks like a very unfortunate mixture of the film adaptations of Eragon and Narnia.
Like the last time around, the 48 frame rate is hyper-realistic, looking like an uncanny set piece or a feverish soap opera. Most of the CGI effects are pretty poor, I don't want to give anything away, but there is a sequence with molten liquid that looks like Nintendo water.
This movie amplified everything I didn't like about the previous installment: poor pacing, fabricated and exaggerated content, cheesy imagery, and a lack of practical effects (particularly with creatures and miniatures).
It seems that this Hobbit trilogy is being executed as an artificial prequel to The Lord of The Rings, full of ominous forebodings that amount to little more than painful nods and familiar musical cues. The events of The Hobbit are almost incidental to the story, which is a real shame, particularly for people just being introduced to Tolkien and Middle Earth, it's a gross misrepresentation.
There were some good things, like the design and performance of Smaug, but overall, this movie was a real bummer.