The Reutrn to Middle Earth is Anything But Desolate

Rating: 8/10 (29 December 2013)

Set in Middle Earth, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug picks up where we left off in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. After a brief opening scene showing Gandalf (Ian McKellen) approaching Thorin (Richard Armitage) and convincing him to take back the dwarf's home at The Lonely Mountain from the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). Time jump twelve months to where we left off in the previous movie, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), Gandalf, Thorin, and the rest of dwarfs frantically run to get away from a pack of Orcs, led by Azog (Manu Bennett), who have been hunting them. After Gandalf leaves to report the coming of a greater evil, Bilbo and the dwarfs venture into the Mirkwood Forest.
The string of bad luck that seems to follows the dwarfs continues, as the lose their way in the forest, get ambushed by a pack of giant spiders, and then are taken prisoner by the woodland elves, led by King Thranduil (Lee Pace). With the help of Bilbo and the ring he found in the goblin lair in An Unexpected Journey, the dwarfs escape the grasp of the elves and eventually make it to Laketown, a small town at the foot of The Lonely Mountain, and eventually back to Erebor, where the dragon Smaug awaits.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is easily better than it's predecessor. An Unexpected Journey was warm and friendly, while DoS was much, much darker. The movie is gripping beyond belief. Being a continuation of the previous movie, DoS jumps directly into the heart-pounding action with the immediate Orc chase. The plot is well thought out and written extremely well. Martin Freeman outperforms himself as Bilbo Baggins since the last movie, and we get to see the true leadership side of Richard Armitage's King Thorin. The movie does jump around quite often, from the dwarfs, to Gandalf's mission, to the elvish troubles of Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom).
While there is nothing glaringly wrong with The Desolation of Smaug, there are a few things here and there that I found fault with. First of all, is found that Gandalf was underused. Granted he had to go off on his own mission that got him in some trouble, there was, honestly, significantly less screen time of Ian McKellen compared to An Unexpected Journey. Secondly, I found that some events of the movie were a tad predictable, and this is coming from someone who has not read the book The Hobbit. Personally, I feel that a greater sense of danger could have been introduced to the film, but, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor setback, especially since it is the second movie of a trilogy. The CGI, however, needs to be addressed. The imagery was absolutely fantastic. The work on the dragon Smaug, in particular, was breathtaking and seemed as if they had an actual dragon.
At the end of the day, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug did its job; it perfectly continued the story left off in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and it perfectly set up for the third film in the trilogy, The Hobbit: There and Back Again. The movie ended with a seamless and gripping cliffhanger, and leaves feelings of satisfaction, desire, and, to an extent, un-fulfillment – a feeling that has a justified place in context of the movie. If you have not yet seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy you can still enjoy and understand The Desolation of Smaug, so long as you see An Unexpected Journey first.
Rating: 8 of 10
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