The only desolation here is in the source material

Rating: 6/10 (22 December 2013)

The six stars that I give this film are all attributable to strength of whatever original material that survives. Peter Jackson and his co- writers have slid down the slippery slope of the Mountain of Adaptation and landed somewhere in the Slough of Fan Fiction. If it were good fiction, I wouldn't have so much of an issue. But it's not. And it's there at the cost of original material left undeveloped.
I would be surprised, for instance, to learn that the company spent more than 10 minutes screen time in Beorn's house. Jackson doesn't dare leave it out, but he has no idea what to do with it. Likewise with the spider sequence--much of Bilbo's cleverness and resolve in rescuing the dwarfs from the arachnids is eliminated and he's reduced to the plucky hobbit-cum-action hero who for some unspecified reason is the only member of the company able to wield his weapon effectively in the webs.
Even more disturbing, Bilbo's singular encounter with Smaug, a high point of the book, is cheapened by a full frontal assault by ten of the dwarfs (three of them have been left behind tending the sick Kili whose pretty little elf-nurse is rushing to his bedside after slicing through a commando squadron of orc SEALS). The sequence culminates in Thorin Oakenshield racing in a wheelbarrow along a river of molten gold to stop the dragon before he takes his revenge on the dwarfs by ravaging the irrelevant and dwarf-less Lake Town.
Why Smaug can't simply kill all ten of the dwarfs when he's destroyed an entire kingdom full of seasoned warriors only 60 years previously is left to the decimated imagination of an audience overfed on CGI.
Of course, Tolkien gives a very good reason for Bilbo's escape: Smaug doesn't know what he is and gets distracted by Bilbo's flattery while Bilbo, partially shielded by his invisibility ring, grabs some treasure and runs for his life. But in mega-production newspeak, that sort of thing isn't cinematic.
I beg to differ. It's mythic, and that makes it cinematic. In Tolkien, the scene is pure Beowulf. A thief steals a few items from the dragon's treasure hoard, and the dragon wakes and wreaks havoc on every living creature in the surrounding countryside. It's practically archetypal. But Jackson and his ilk are superior to archetypes.
Jackson's contempt for his source material is only slightly greater than his contempt for his actors. He has an enviable cast, who are all reduced to doing little more than realize the visual concepts of John Howe and Alan Lee. This, I suppose, at least ensures that the movie has a great look--and, like the first one and the LOTR trilogy, it does. But there's little else. When Martin Freeman is actually asked to act, as he is in the sequences where Bilbo meets Gollum and Smaug, he's quite good, as is Andy Serkis. But there's precious little acting that goes on otherwise. Richard Armitage as Thorin glowers and sneers his way through his scenes, mostly because he's been misdirected (or possibly, more charitably considered, uncorrected) by Jackson. Orlando Bloom shows up as Legolas (no worries, as elves age backwards--or was that Merlin?) and seems even more intent on his image as the cool bad-ass elf hottie than he was in the trilogy (although one wonders how much more he has to work to get laid these days). Even Ian McKellan spends most of the time trying to look either wise and grandfatherly or like a cranky old man, only occasionally sharing a Shakespearean bellow as he rebukes evil in, presumably, elvish or Betazoid or Norwegian or something.
As long as they have the look, Jackson doesn't seem to care about what they say or emote. Instead, he gleefully uses the camera to simulate a computer game--and boy howdy, just wait until it comes out. Now, I don't want to seem like a crank. As a game, this one will probably be pretty fun. But crikey, stop pretending it's a movie. Because it ain't. And it ain't the Hobbit anymore, either.
Except, like I said, for the parts that remain. The desolation. One can hope that the future will hold a technology that allows users of digital movies to easily cut the film apart and put it back together, perhaps in some semblance of what a REAL version of the Hobbit might actually look like.
But until then, we have this. The film reeks of Jackson, Jackson, and more Jackson. Evidently, he wasn't humbled at all by his epic failure to remake King Kong, an endeavor for which he still stands in the shadow of the great Merian C. Cooper like an anemic little boy wearing his soldier-daddy's clothes.
Living with that sort of failure must breed bitterness. Too bad he's chosen to take it out on Tolkien, another giant whom he admires but is too arrogant to embrace. Instead, he's taken a great children's classic and marked it like a junkyard dog.
The sad thing is that I'll probably go see the third, and buy them all as well. Namarie.