Spotlight #12- the Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug

Continuing our countdown to the release of "the Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies" next week, we have another review, this time for the second installment in the franchise. As we were teased in the trailer above, this is the first time in the entire Middle-Earth saga we're finally shown the main villain- or any dragon for that matter. High hopes were set, but expectations weren't set quite up there with the knowledge that this would be a trilogy and the memory of how much the first film seemed to drag on. Good for us, then, when we finally went into the theaters and were shown where this entry stood. While still not on the same level as some of LotR's best, it's still a massively fun ride that vastly improved on the first film's drawbacks.

In this entry, the company of Thorin Oakenshield continues on their way to their mountain to retrieve their gold. With Gandalf gone to fulfill the necromancer sub-pot from the first film, they now must journey through dark mystic forests, the kingdom of a corrupt elvish traitor, the turmoil that is Laketown, and, at last, the mountain. Their burglar, the titular Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, is finally starting to show what it takes to infiltrate a dragon's lair, but much more sinister things are afoot. As orcs are following close behind and Bilbo's new ring starts to show what power it has, a more ancient evil lurks; something much more desolating...

For those of you who read the novel, you may remember that there was much more going on in the middle third of the book than the first. It really does show here- action picks up right off the bat. With encounters with the irritable Beorn, traps laid by vicious spiders, a well-orchestrated fight on river during a barrel escape, and so on, so goes most of the emptiness from "an Unexpected Journey". You could say that it dies down a little bit in Laketown with a drastic change in composition and tone, but that only comes about twenty minutes before the climax and is thankfully brief. While the "Journey" wasn't necessarily bad in this respect, it needed improvement, and that's precisely what we got.

Naturally, this segment also showed us quite a bit of new material as well, hence the three-hour run time. This run, though, none of it really felt out of place or redundant. The aforementioned necromancer subplot, for example, was raised from a brief mention of sorts into something particularly interesting- a nice mix of horror and tie-ins to LotR that can keep you busy while the dwarves are stuck in Laketown. There's also a love triangle of sorts between the dwarf Kili, Legolas (graciously reprised by Orlando Bloom), and a new female elf named Tauriel. While it isn't vastly interconnected with the plot- at least, not enough for me to care when they switch between their situation and the dragon's lair- it is still interesting enough. Very few elements this time are wasted, and it comes together much more nicely than the Stone Giant scene from before.

It's safe to say that the biggest draw was Smaug, the dragon in the heart of the dwarven mountain. As the centerpiece of the whole story, he deserves a great deal of finesse and grandeur. Somehow, against everything I had hoped or expected, Smaug managed to rise above it all. True to the books, he's an incredibly malicious character, full of ham and a few surprises intellectually. Not only does he play well with Martin Freeman in the script, but he's just a sight to behold. With motion capture and voice talent provided by Benedict Cumberbatch, every line seeps with threat and terror. He's rendered with rather awe-inspiring realism, in stark contrast to most of the other creatures from the previous film, and his scenes with the dwarves and such end up becoming rather creative in excecution, if a little bit over-the-top.
"The Desolation of Smaug" has become a sort of "Empire Strikes Back" for the Hobbit trilogy. Sure, it has its flaws, but we're much more willing to accept those with the massive upgrade from "Journey". The action finally picked up, and the side-plots feel like they matter again, not just to us but to the whole of Middle Earth. Add in a dash of the great and terrible SMAUG himself, and you've got a film in the same league as the original trilogy's "the Two Towers". If you're like me (and wouldn't you be if you were reading this?) you saw this in theaters, bought it on DVD or Blu-Ray, saw it at home again, and...

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