Review and critical overview

Rating: 4/10 (22 January 2019)

'The Desolation of Smaug', in which the Head of the 'Thorin Mining Corporation' and a bunch of disgruntled ex employees and a hobbit continue their attempt to get back the company that was taken from them in a ruthless takeover by the 'Smaug Group'. If they succeed in this enterprise, Smaug is sitting on so much gold that if released into the Global 'Middle Earth' Economy, would result in an economic meltdown of such proportions that it would most likely bring all powerful 'Sauron Enterprises' and it's associated conglomerates to it's knees. The fallout of all which, might mean that even the faraway shires could find itself inundated with unemployed Orcs looking for work, with all the associated unpleasantness associated with that. I mean Orcs don't seem very happy at the best of times.
I can see the practical and financial logic why they've bulked out the slim volume that is 'The Hobbit', I just oh so wished they hadn't. They could have made this a tight, fun, ordinary length film, but they didn't. And because of that although the Hobbit is a prequel, it feels cinematically like a sequel to me, like it should be called 'LOTR Reloaded' or 'LOTR Sauron Strikes back'. The trouble is, is that this film is a corporate entity, it is financed by them, it's execution is corporate in nature and it's themes, although admittedly critical, are corporate as well, which my initial jokey 1st paragraph reflected.
Since writing this 'review. I watched the the last one... oh dear. A shabby world war was about to occur between the feuding middle-earthers, when in stormed the Orcs to turn this rather squalid tale into something like a 'just war'. Oh those Orcs ! Those middle earth Dalek equivalents were one of the main beefs I had with this film. Orcs and their sidekicks are one dimensional things - They have - No back story - No family - No ecology - And are relentlessly ugly and evil (The connotations of that combination always jar with me). I could take the one dose of them in the original LOTR story, but here they are tediously overused to create a very clumsy moral dynamic in order to keep the whole unnecessary trilogy going.
And one final point this film is called 'The Hobbit' and I thought Martin Freeman's performance was rather good and could have been the heart of a good film, But most of the time he was sidelined to the role of bemused spectator in this LOTR rehash of a story that he was supposed be the centre character of. However, he could not be the kind of hero that you have to have in these kinds of CGI heavy fantasy films and because of that in this telling of the story, he really was a bit of a fraud and didn't deserve the love and respect he had from the fellow dwarves.
So I give 'The Desolation of Smaug' 40%, it's alright, and the highlight for me was the dragon and his conversation with Bilbo. It was a bit better than the first one...... or was it that maybe I was just battered into submission.