Good but could have been so much more

Rating: 5/10 (30 December 2013)

I will start with the positive. The visuals are stunning. If you can do catch it in 3D - it is really worth the money. There will not be things coming at you out of the screen but scenes have a depth and clarity that I haven't seen in other films. This is probably also due to the high frame rate. Costumes and sets are beautiful. It is easy to spot John Howe's and Alan Lee's creative hand in the design and Weta Workshop reliably delivered. Smaug is literally a "magnificent" digital character and Benedict Cumberbatch's voice performance gave me goosebumps. In general I think the cast was once again very appropriately chosen. Lee Pace as Thranduil was another highlight for me. These are the reasons why the movie still gets a 7 rating.
However, I find that this is the second time that Peter Jackson has delivered a really memorable first episode to a trilogy but then didn't follow through. This movie could still be so much better than 7. The screenwriters didn't add as much as it may seem. A lot of the stuff Gandalf is shown doing does occur in Tolkien's writing - just not in The Hobbit. Furthermore, the segment of the story Jackson has chosen for Desolation of Smaug ends right before the first climax of the book, so they had to add some sort of epic ending to this episode. Maybe that choice of partitioning the story was the first mistake. There was a lot to cover but they didn't want to make the audience go without a dragon for another episode. At the same time there had to be enough story left for part 3. That makes a few things a bit awkward. I found that the first hour or so felt very rushed: Beorn - check, forest - check, spiders - check, elves - check. Then the movie dwells on an impossible love story that is, worse still, just a recycled plot and scenes from Lord of the Rings. Laketown and Bard, I felt, were then overly complicated. Bard now leads a revolution of one against a government of two, just to add some more conflict. In general I felt that the movie introduced way too much conflict into the plot. Even epic fantasy does not need to be packed full of hack-and-slash action at every possible minute. Finally comes a huge, all-new (see above), slightly bloated and quite implausible climax before the actual climax in part 3. Could a dozen dwarfs, assisted by a hobbit, take on a dragon when a whole army of their forefathers failed? They try and fail, of course, but survive only because of some of the most impossibly lucky circumstances ever. Like the dragon flying right over them and not seeing them!
You could say these are all details (I've even omitted the minor ones) and there's nothing wrong with the plot as a whole. Still, these details add up. They left a slightly bitter taste after leaving the cinema. I don't see a need for every new episode to be a superlative over the previous one. Jackson has shown he can tell a story well. I wish he had focused on that more. There are too many what-were-they-thinking moments. So far Desolation is the weakest of his Tolkien adaptations.