[Zigûr]

(Apologies for how long this is!)

Well, I'm back.
I just returned from the cinema and it's bizarre already to consider that perhaps a third of the way into the film I was thinking "Am I going to be astonishing the members of the Barrow-Downs with a positive review of this film?" I was, to be honest, rather enjoying myself.

While there were numerous objectionable elements, taken on its own I could more or less switch off my purist outrage and enjoy it for what was there. I laughed at the Bombur barrel sequence and I felt like Bilbo was getting, to some extent, the attention he deserved. All in all I was finding it to be a dumb action film, and a fairly appalling adaptation, but nonetheless enjoyable in itself.
The feeling didn't last.

At some point in Lake-town I realised that suddenly the plot had splintered into pieces. Suddenly we have five protagonists: Bilbo, Thorin, Bard, Tauriel and Gandalf. This is a film where everyone is just a supporting character in someone else's story, a character house of cards. Unlike the films of The Lord of the Rings, these films are trying to extend the narrative rather than compress them, and so they completely lose focus. I was reassured to see the film regain some attention on Bilbo towards the end, but as a result I found the incessant cutaways to Lake-town and Dol Guldur increasingly exasperating. How many times did we need to see Bard squinting out of a window looking serious or Gandalf wandering around some ruins constantly repeating his +10 Energy Bubble of Reveal Magic? Then Thorin showed up in the Mountain and it just went on. And on. And on.

In The Road to Middle-earth, Professor Tom Shippey suggests that Professor Tolkien was "always a prey to two competing forces. One was the urge to escape mortality by some way other than Christian consolation: so far he was 'escapist'. The other was the total conviction that that urge was impossible, even forbidden." (372) An overriding irrationality in the human condition which Professor Tolkien identified with intense scrutiny was the vain desire for endlessness, changelessness, immortality - both figurative and literal. The great failing of the Noldor after the First Age was their impossible dream of building endless paradise in a fundamentally mortal world. The folly of the Númenóreans was that they could not accept the inevitability of their own deaths. The evil of the One Ring and its slave-rings, the Nine in particular, was that they caused to endure perpetually, in increasing weariness, that which should have changed or passed on. Nor even could rustic and sedentary Hobbits persist indefinitely in their own comfortable space. The greatest failing of these films is their blindness to this overriding theme of Professor Tolkien's work.

These films are obsessed with constant extension and repetition. Our heroes are assailed by interchangeable orcs on at least four occasions, none of which appear to serve any purposes whatsoever. These, especially the barrel scene and the attack on Bard's house, are stretched out far beyond the limits of credibility. Every time the orcs seem defeated more appear, usually for the sake of more stylised choreography from Orlando Bloom, portraying a character who was not even invented when the source material was written. How long does Kíli spend lying around moaning and groaning endlessly while James Nesbitt flounders about in a furry hat? In the Music of the Ainur, Melkor's discord was "loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes." This film's obsession with repetitive action set-pieces immediately evoked this situation to my mind. Yet at other times, scenes seem ridiculously throwaway. In the case of Beorn, an opportunity for some genuine action featuring orcs fighting bears is completely missed. Later, Gandalf travels to the "High Fells." He speaks briefly to Radagast, looks at some "Nazgûl tombs" and immediately leaves. There is material here which either requires validation and does not receive it, or simply does not need to be present, doing nothing more than inflating the film's exhausting runtime.

The most egregious example of this is the film's inexplicable fetishisation of Azog, an extremely minor character from Dwarven history transformed for no apparent reason into a figure whose importance to Sauron's plans and within his heirarchy seems to rival that of the Black Captain himself. He even argues with the Dark Lord, having approached him on a podium above a pit in a bizarre parody of Darth Vader's conversations with the Emperor in The Empire Strikes Back.
This is what "The Desolation of Smaug" feels like to me: a George Lucas film. But not Star Wars but rather Indiana Jones. Now I greatly enjoy the Indiana Jones films. Contrarian that I am, I even love Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and think that the frankly disturbing levels of hatred directed towards it are a horrifying exemplar of humanity's capacity for contemptible herd-mentality group-think. Yet I enjoy Indy for what it is: originally, homages to 30s adventure serials. In the case of the fourth film, a pastiche of 50s B-movie paranoia. Indiana Jones films also generally don't go for nearly three hours. Yet the world of Indiana Jones, with its face-melting McGuffins, despicable Nazis and indestructible hero is, all things considered, a far cry from Professor Tolkien's efforts to construct a plausible fantasy world. Yet Peter Jackson's Middle-earth is now, apparently, a place where characters can survive endless fifty-foot drops, where open barrels constantly deluged with water never fill up and risk drowning their inhabitants, who are perfectly capable of effectively fighting from within them, where it is possible for Thorin to ride a wheelbarrow down a river of molten gold. When Indiana Jones jumped into a lead-lined refrigerator to survive the detonation of an atomic bomb, unlike many viewers I found it to be a perfectly satisfactory escape - within the typical limits of Indiana Jones. What I don't expect to see in Middle-earth is, for instance, characters surviving obviously lethal flame just by standing behind a pillar or Thorin swinging on chains like a swashbuckling nightmare.

In this regard, the film doesn't even feel like a plausible prequel to Jackson's own adaptations of The Lord of the Rings. Despite a few ridiculous moments like Aragorn's plunge off the cliff, Legolas' shield-surfing and his later slaying of the mûmak, the action for the most part seemed reasonably, if not entirely, realistic. Now everything is stylised beyond belief, as if Jackson is parodying himself. The situation is only exacerbated by the film's excessive amount of CGI, eschewing the practical effects which lent the earlier films one of their strengths. Azog still appears to be made of white plastic. Bolg looks awful, and the replacement of his interesting red-bearded practical design with the new generic bald-headed substitute is disappointing. The golden statue also looked incredibly fake. I expect that so much of the budget was devoted to animating the dragon that everything else suffered.

As usual, the major changes to the plot generally served no purpose beyond, in the case of Tauriel and Kíli's ineffable romance, corporate four-quadrants box-ticking which, with inadvertent cynicism, completely contradicts the film's efforts to replicate the book's message about the dangers of greed. Boyens and Walsh's Frankensteinian hybridisation of Professor Tolkien's original dialogue, their own hapless attempts to pastiche it with glossing straight from the Big Book of Fantasy Cliché, and jarring modern idiom renders the tone utterly inconsistent. Armitage's Thorin is a tedious antihero who feels like a hybrid of film Boromir and film Denethor. Thranduil was accidentally comical in his speech and motions, bordering on pantomime. Orlando Bloom seemed to be treating the whole thing as a joke, appropriately enough. Martin Freeman is, unsurprisingly, effective in the humorous moments, but I felt less so at other times. Probably the funniest moment was simply the sight of him in the pointed Lake-town hat and ear-warmers. Ian McKellen to me seemed wasted with the CGI Dol Guldur nonsense. The shot constantly zooming into Sauron's head was particularly strange. Cumberbatch was adequate as Smaug, but he seemed inconsistently-portrayed, at times a ruthless killer and at others a bumbling fool.

I saw this film in High Frame Rate, which I hadn't experienced before. I often felt like I was watching the opening pre-rendered cutscene of an early 2000s video game, especially in the forge scene towards the conclusion. Incidentally, what an absurd suggestion - why on earth would the fire-breathing dragon be harmed by molten gold? The references to the broader legendarium were twisted beyond recognition to the point where including things like Girion of Dale and accurately naming Bard's son Bain bordered on meaninglessness. Unlike the earlier films, Sauron appeared and even spoke, but was characterised in a completely generic way. Having him manifest like that and even confront Gandalf completely flies in the face of his depiction in those films as well.

In conclusion I would have to express my thoughts on "The Desolation of Smaug" according to multiple categories. As a brainless action film? It would have been vastly improved by being forty minutes to an hour shorter. As an adaptation of Professor Tolkien's original novel? Predictably inconstant: surprisingly adherent on a very, very broad scale of general narrative progression, but discordant in the details, often in needless ways. This is a film which has no faith in its source material in terms of tone or narrative priority despite an adaptation of The Hobbit being, on a fundamental level, a product which would surely sell itself. Finally, as a component of Peter Jackson's own soon-to-be-hexalogy? By exaggerating the silliness established in "An Unexpected Journey" it feels very out of place with the films which put this entire project in motion in the first place.

I'm sure I'll think of other things in time, but I mostly feel disappointed because at the beginning I was enjoying myself. Adaptation aside, I'm just not convinced this worked in general. The Hobbit could, in the right hands, be a rollicking comedy-drama adventure about one person's journey of self-discovery in the company of a group of grumpy, greedy middle-aged men (or Dwarves as the case may be). As an epic, and as a trilogy, it is in my opinion simply not working. Perhaps, however, some time in 2015 at the end of it all there's a good chance some talented soul might be able to forge a reasonably enjoyable fan edit out of all this carry-on.