The Desolation

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by NogrodtheGreat

Yes! I'm also in Australia and now, after having read several reviews and seen the pandering, simpering praise the movie's gotten on TORN (as if you'd expect any better) I'm reconsidering my Boxing Day. Maybe I'll go to the Ashes Test after all..

I don't understand TORN. I've occasionally considered joining, but like equivalent major forums for other things it seems to me to be the kind of place where if you don't follow the herd you can expect to a) get ignored (if you're lucky) or more likely b) get metaphorically dragged out into the street and shot by people whose self esteem is so abysmal they can't tolerate people having different opinions to their own for fear that doing so will invalidate and annihilate their own identity.

There seems to be this sort of attitude I'm perceiving in reviews elsewhere that Professor Tolkien for all intents and purposes "didn't do a good enough job" with the source material in terms of description or characterisation and needed Peter Jackson to come along, chuck his life's work into the Hollywood meat grinder and produce something which conformed to the standards of the insidious neoliberal media so that it wouldn't ruffle any feathers.

But I digress...
As much as I dislike the films, I don't understand why we get them so late compared to the rest of the world. There must be some marketing reason, but it still strikes me as odd that Australia gets them substantially later than almost every other country in the world.

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

There must be some marketing reason, but it still strikes me as odd that Australia gets them substantially later than almost every other country in the world.

Does that include New Zealand?

[skip spence]

The whole thing does get infuriating eh? Well I'm not really furious, I save that emotion to more worthy occasions, and I haven't seen DoS and doubt that I ever will, but I mean, PJ says that even two 3-hour films isn't enough to tell the story (that is a short novel), but then when the films screen it turns out that most of the story and characters that are in the book feature only nominally, if at all. Which makes 'the story needs three films' a ridiculous argument, unless it is PJ's story, loosely based on The Hobbit, that needs the added screentime, and not JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit. Of course we all know the real reason of why they made it a trilogy, and PJ would say something like that, what else could he say? Still it's sort of depressing eh?

It's been a while since I read the book, but as I remember it my enjoyment really started to go up from about the point when the party hit Mirkwood and that it was pretty excellent from then on. Too bad they seem to have changed those parts the most.

[Aganzir]

I was telling a coworker about the film (as a matter of fact I've been telling a lot of my coworkers about the film and have received varying amounts of sympathy) and he asked, 'What's next? Maybe Peter Jackson will film a trilogy about Tom Bombadil.'

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Did they actually do a joke on this or did Kiligolas take an arrow to the knee and the writers left it to us to fill in the joke?

Alas the correct physiological name for it would probably be 'thigh', so it's me rather than the film makers who is joking here.

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Especially when in the book, it was Thorin who sought out Gandalf for help.

Exactly! Their dialogue is beautifully written in the book, and I love the feel of it! I love their dynamics in the Quest of Erebor, Gandalf getting annoyed with the dwarves and all, but PJ and his crew have put it upside down. It's Gandalf checking things off his How To Save The World list, and Thorin sulking 'do not want!' When you put it together with his singleminded determination later, it just does not compute. It's like he's a slowly programmable robot.

Now come on! Bilbo rescuing the Dwarves in the book alone was such a defining moment in his character! But no: not good or "cinematic" enough for PJ, I guess.

Nope. He cuts the web that keeps them in the trees, but they do most of the fighting - and the only reason he doesn't get captured along with them is, he's too busy further off fighting a spider that keeps him from his precious. All in all he uses the Ring very little - less than Frodo, even - and while I understand it's probably for cinematographic reasons, I think it would also have provided a brilliant visual challenge and would eventually have looked better too.

Hopefully there weren't many PDAs. Those theaters would have some awful messes to clean up.

No just a lot of weird tender looks and that closing scene where they hold hands. Even if the healing scene looks like she was doing something quite different.

Did Bard need money to pay off some old debts?

No, he just had hungry mouths to feed. Balin is actually very cute while negotiating the deal, and Gloin too when he tries not to pay his share.

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

a joke made by Legolas about Gloin's family is funny

It's not, it's so cruel I can't even begin to describe it! My heart goes out to Gloin and his wife and little Gimli, and all the rest of the dwarves.

Thranduil is apparently a hero of the First Age, or coming from Gondolin (and so is Legolas, since the swords seem to belong to him by right) - that's maybe not so uncanonical, since originally Thranduil was, obviously, some sort of wannabe-First Age-maybe-Thingol-esque-figure, when Tolkien still wasn't sure what he's actually writing

Yeah, apparently the Gondolin swords were made by Legolas's 'people'. I beg to differ here even though I can understand why they would write it in. And I must admit I like Thranduil against my will - he's certainly not a favourite in the book, but they did a decent job with him, awful as he is.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

There must be some marketing reason, but it still strikes me as odd that Australia gets them substantially later than almost every other country in the world.

Does Australia have a competitive relationship with New Zealand? Do the countries tell jokes of each other? Does NZ want to play a prank on Australia? Or do they count on the most avid fans flying to NZ to see it?

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Aganzir

Alas the correct physiological name for it would probably be 'thigh', so it's me rather than the film makers who is joking here.

I'm quite pleased to discover this...which is a pretty sad state of affairs if you think about it.

However, all I needed was to hear Thorin intone, "My nephew Kili used to be an adventurer. Then he took an arrow to the knee." and I probably would have totally lost it in a spectacular and most unfunny way.

No just a lot of weird tender looks and that closing scene where they hold hands. Even if the healing scene looks like she was doing something quite different.

MY BRAIN!! GET IT OUT OF MY BRAIN!!!!!

[Thinlómien]

Alright, so I thought the movie would be bad, but it was awful. Greenie, who was sitting next to me in the cinema, can witness I was like shell-shocked. The core of the problem is that the film works neither as an adaptation of Tolkien's writings (it has hardly any of the plot or the atmosphere) nor as a random fantasy action adventure (badly written and directed).


I enjoyed:

+ Martin Freeman. That guy just nails Bilbo, plus he has the astonishing ability to surf through all the silliness with just about the right mix of comedy and drama. Without him the movie would have been unbearable.

+ Smaug. True, he's taken to the direction of the generic monster-villain, but he still retains a delightful amount of the original dialogue, plus at times he looks just gorgeous (like in the very last scene flying towards Laketown in the night and shaken molten gold off his scales. I also think the fire-breathing was done very neatly.)

+ The Elves. Orlando Bloom has been praised above and not without reason. Like Martin Freeman, he can actually pull off the silly stuff, plus he gets some of the funnier jokes. I also quite liked Tauriel/Evangeline Lilly, and Lee Pace's Thranduil was enjoyably awful. And Galion! I felt like cheering when I heard the name.

+ The Dol Guldur plotline. True, not much happens, but actually having some dialogue between Gandalf and Radagast was nice every now and then, and the "duel" between Gandalf and Sauron was visually amazing. (And really even not as cringeworthy plotwise as I make it sound!) Also they imply Thráin is still alive, which should make for an interesting scene in the next movie.

+ Bard. Bard, Bard, Bard. On the surface, the smuggler single dad is not the guy from the book, but he has delightfully the same character. Here is the pessimistic herald of doom, respected but not listened to, slightly in the outskirts of the Laketown society, and a very epic man. Also apologies to all the Dwarf fangirls and Thrandy fangirls out there, but Bard is the hottest man in the movie by far.

+ the Laketown part all in all. The plot gets more followable and interesting for a time there, and Laketown looked good compared to what I thought based on the trailers (Russian Winter Wonderland). Of course I could have complaints about Dwarves coming out of toilets and ocean's eleving around, but it was still (mostly) entertaining.

+ (kind of) the action scenes. I think they were less boring than in the previous movie!

+ cute Dwarf moments. We saw shamefully little of the Dwarves and their relationships with each other, but when we did, it was quite cute. I especially liked Balin's emotional return to Erebor and Fili big brothering over Kili.


I was disappointed with: (where do I even start?)

- the ridiculous triangle drama. I think a romance was totally unnecessary and made my feminist side cringe ("hey let's introduce a major female character so she can be someone's love interest!"). But the worst thing was that they couldn't keep it on the level of a romance, but they had to make a triangle drama out of it. Like, didn't they promise there wouldn't be anything romantic between Tauriel and Legolas???

- all the other plot installments by Jackson & co. Like Kili getting wounded by a morgul arrow so that he & couple of other Dwarves have to stay behind in Laketown, where they get attacked by orcs, and are then saved by Tauriel and Legolas, and then Kili is healed by Tauriel using Athelas? No, no, and no!

- the writing in general. The dialogue was bad and repetitive (as mentioned above, "it is the only way", "I have the only right", "this is our only chance" and so on.) The scenes were written thinking the audience gets bored is something doesn't explode after 50 seconds or so. It was incredibly tiresome. Lastly, 90% of the brand new plot twists were incredibly predictable. (Greenie and I kept saying to each other "and now Tauriel will appear and save them" and then that would happen 2 seconds later, and so on. Argh! Frustration.)

- the direction in general. With all the messing around, the balancing between a slapstick farce and an epic adventure, good actors like Richard Armitage and even Ian McKellen were occasionally losing their grip. It was awful to watch. Also, PJ continues in the line that everything has to be painfully emphasised. When Bilbo drops the Ring in Mirkwood and has to battle a giant crab to get it back, we get about 1,5min of Martin Freeman making pained expressions holding the shining ring to make sure we all understood Bilbo was afraid he had lost the Ring. Blaaaa....

- the music. Howard Shore seems to be as disinterested about TH movies as us old school 'downers. Here we got a new theme for Laketown, but that was it. Even the epic dwarf music wasn't utilised as much as it could and should have been!

- Beorn. As said above, his lack of screentime was ridiculous, and made his whole appearance rather pointless. He was given crappy lines and he looked positively awful, especially in the bear form. (The actor was fine, though, and I quite liked how his house looked and the giant bees and the spotted ponies.)

- the overload of action and stupid jokes. But this was to be expected, and both could have been worse, I guess.

- tired recycling of stuff from An Unexpected Journey and the LotR trilogy. Starting from the carrot cameo in Bree up until glow-in-dark Arw... Tauriel performing Elvish healing magic. A lot of the time I just had a feeling I've seen all of this before, and it was better the last time around (yes, even the carrot).


That's it for now, I guess, I bet I've forgotten something. I would have liked to enjoy this film, at least on some level, but the truth is that I was mostly either horrified, frustrated or bored. After seeing An Unexpected Journey for the first time I disapproved of a lot of stuff, yes, but I was excited too, my head full of epic Dwarves and the magic of Middle-Earth, and I wanted to see the movie again despite all of its shortcomings. It took me a while to figure out the movie was actually a lot worse than the LotR trilogy was.

The sad thing is that The Desolation of Smaug didn't hold even that meager amount of magic for me. When I left the cinema, the only thing I was enthusiastic about was complaining about the movie. And mind you, I had done my best to see the movie with an open mind and cast my puritanism aside and enjoy it just as an epic adventure. I hope and believe that the next movie will be better.

[Aganzir]

Also I'd like to add that it is unforgivable and completely against the spirit of the book(s) to introduce sexual innuendo into the dialogue.

Kili to Tauriel upon capture: 'Why don't you search my trousers? There might be something there.'
Tauriel: 'Or nothing.'

This said by me who has been likened to Captain Jack Harkness and not without a reason.

[Nerwen]

In other news, now that more bad reviews have started to appear, all the loonier fans out there have started on the hysterical anti-critic ranting, conspiracy theories and the rest of the DRAHMA! that I’m sure we all fondly remember from last time.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

+ (kind of) the action scenes. I think they were less boring than in the previous movie!

I did not mention this, but they indeed were not as bad. Even the barrel-riding scene, which looked so awful in the trailers, was not that bad in the end. In general, I am rather fed up with the action scenes in movies nowadays, when on top of everything, they are absolutely confused and un-followable (just lots of random confusing shots with violently moving camera) and unrealistic (people falling from fifty meters, or giving each other blows which would kill them, but then just brushing it off and continuing), but compared to the first movie, this got somewhat better. Maybe except for the ridiculous "Final Level: Complete The Puzzle To Get Rid Of The Boss Monster" part.

Originally Posted by Lommy

- all the other plot installments by Jackson & co. Like Kili getting wounded by a morgul arrow so that he & couple of other Dwarves have to stay behind in Laketown, where they get attacked by orcs, and are then saved by Tauriel and Legolas, and then Kili is healed by Tauriel using Athelas? No, no, and no!

Actually, I only now fully grasped the ridiculousness of it. Of course it is absolutely awful, but what worse, the audience not familiar with the books but only with the movies would easily draw the parallel (as it undoubtedly was meant to be) between Kili's "Morgul arrow" and Frodo's near-death by Morgul blade (interesting that the arrow didn't disappear in daylight...) - so it's not only "borrowing" the same name in utterly silly context, but now it makes one wonder, what would have happened had Kili not been cured in time? Would he have, *gasp*, turned into a Ringwraith?

Originally Posted by Aganzir

Also I'd like to add that it is unforgivable and completely against the spirit of the book(s) to introduce sexual innuendo into the dialogue.

Kili to Tauriel upon capture: 'Why don't you search my trousers? There might be something there.'
Tauriel: 'Or nothing.'

This said by me who has been likened to Captain Jack Harkness and not without a reason.

Hear, hear!