The Desolation Of Smaug Has 10 Big Problems

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was a mixed experience. Even those who liked the film (myself included) have to admit that it had problems, with its awkward rhythm, over indulgence in action scenes and general long-windedness. But for all its flaws, I appreciated quite a few things about An Unexpected Journey. Whenever Bilbo was the center of attention, the film soared. The Riddles in the Dark scene was magnificent. The film was (mostly) gorgeous to look at, and quite a few other little details marked the film as a success, rickety as it was. With the release of The Desolation of Smaug, it would seem like this series will actually hit its stride. The stakes are higher, Bilbo has more to do, the Ring is now fully in play, and we finally get to witness Smaug.

If the movie is half as good as this scene, I'm in.

I just saw The Desolation of Smaug, and I need to get this off my chest: Not only has Jackson failed to avoid the problems of his first installment, but he's introduced a myriad of new flaws, disappointments and over indulgences to a series that is now showing it's true colors as the over-stuffed cash grab that it is. These are the ones that stuck out to me.

1. Things just sort of start happening... and they continue to just sort of... happen.
Good sequels have a way of re-acquainting the audience with the story. The audience catches up with the characters in meaningful, interesting ways (Sarah Connor is in a mental institute, a salvage team rescues Ripley from an eighty year hyper sleep), the audience is invited back into the world in a striking fashion (The Star Destroyer sending probe droids down to Hoth, the future war sequence in T2) and the film just takes its time letting the audience settle into the narrative again. For being such a long movie, The Desolation of Smaug flippently tosses scenes at you left and right from the get-go, and there's no time to actually re-acclimate. First we have the incredibly underwhelming flashback scene in Bree with Gandalf and Thorin, then the dwarves are running away from Wargs, encountering Beorn, getting lost in mirkwood, fighting spiders and being captured by elves within the first thirty minutes. There are no grand establishing shots, no sense of "Yes. We're back in it." Just stuff. Stuff happening. Even the weakest of the LoTR films, The Two Towers, does a great job of dunking you back into Middle Earth (remember that fantastic Balrog opening?) and re-connecting all the dots from The Fellowship of the Ring. More on this sort of stuff later.

2. Beorn is a poorly designed afterthought.
Good design is a hard thing to pin down, but you know it when you see it, and you really know it when you don't. I couldn't stand Beorn. He's too skinny, too eye-brow-y, and he feels like he's of no consequence whatsoever. Then, just as soon as you're starting to process this new character, he's gone, never to be heard from again (until the third film, that is). He feels like a mere footnote, not the powerful, shape-shifting monster that I loved when my mom read The Hobbit to me as a kid.

3. Invisibility is handled poorly.
I get it. Invisibility is fine and dandy to describe in a book, but it doesn't exactly read well on film. The LoTR films hardly feature it at all, and any occurrences of someone wearing the ring are so brief that they don't pose a problem. The Hobbit poses big problems. Multiple scenes require Bilbo to be invisible for extended periods of time, so Peter Jackson had to make some decisions about how to "show" invisibility. Well, I really wish I didn't have to watch the entire spider scene through the "ring-vision" blur filter, and then Bilbo just takes the ring off with Smaug, which effects that scene in ways that I'll hit on later.

4. The Kili and Tauriel love story is beyond ridiculous.
I don't even feel like I need to explain myself here. This sub-plot is the worst offender in the "Why On Earth Is This In The Movie" category. It's embarrassing, unnecessary, and feels like a particularly painful slap in the face to Tolkien's work. Hilariously, Evangeline Lilly herself didn't even want this subplot in the movie.

5. GoPro Footage.
There are these nifty things called GoPro's. They're tiny, $300 cameras that are designed to mount on helmets and whatever else you want to put them on in order to capture footage that would otherwise be impossible to shoot. They're great gadgets, but they simply have no place in a $250,000,000 production. End of story. When my wife and I saw the first shot of GoPro footage in the barrel scene, we looked at each other in disbelief. Its highly compressed, stroboscopic images stick out like a sore thumb in a film that is otherwise shot with 5K camera rigs that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how anyone involved thought that was a good idea.

6. Every scene has orcs in it.
Yes, that's an exaggeration, but seriously, think of any iconic scene in the book and just know that there's an 80% chance that orcs are involved in some way now. An Unexpected Journey suffered from this a bit, too, but Smaug ratchets it up to a whole other level. It's clear that Jackson is scraping the bottom of the bucket, trying to inject tension and conflict where it simply isn't needed. The ironic thing is that...

7. Tension and rising action are non-existent.
Conflict and danger don't seem to have any weight to them in Smaug. This goes along with my first point about that "things just happening" feeling. Nothing stuck to the wall for me. There's no foreboding or underlying sense of jeopardy. "Here's the bad, nasty King of Laketown and he's bad and nasty for reasons! Here's Gandalf going off to fight this Necromancer because that's just the thing to do. Here's Beorn. He's a bear thing. Bye Beorn. Oh yeah, there's a dragon in this story, too. He's bad news." On that note...

8. Smaug is not nearly as terrifying as he should be.
Smaug had a few good things going for him. Benedict Cumberbatch has a sweet voice, and the design looks pretty nifty, but Smaug, like everything else in the movie, is just sort of... there. Even though he's not on screen until the last forty minutes or so, Smaug absolutely has to command a certain presence through the length of the move. The film desperately needs a sense of dread emanating from his very existence, with the lonely mountain serving as a haunting spire protruding from the landscape, keeping the company of dwarves ever-mindful of the terrible monster that lies in wait for them. Instead, it felt like the dwarves reached Erabor and then said to Bilbo, "Oh yeah, there's a dragon in there." Aside from the build-up (or lack thereof), Smaug himself doesn't feel all that dangerous. In the book, the only reason why Smaug is entertaining the thought of speaking with Bilbo is because he can't see him, and the reader knows that if Bilbo removes the ring Smaug will disintegrate him. Now here's Bilbo practically dancing in front of Smaug in plain sight and they're just having a chat, and beyond that, Smaug's battle with the dwarves is cartoonish and dopey, with Smaug bypassing opportunities to fry Thorin's company right and left.

9. The ending is a disappointing, head-scratching sucker punch.
I was fully expecting the film to end with [spoilers ahead] Smaug attacking Laketown and being killed by Bard, with the movie then setting the stage for the battle of the five armies. Instead, Smaug is seen flying towards Laketown after battling the dwarves, the screen goes black, and any momentum the film had going for it completely and awkwardly dies. I generally think that entering a movie with expectations is a gross error, but quite frankly, I'm laying the fault on the movie with this one. The fight with Smaug at the end simply didn't feel like a climax. A good film gives you effective indicators when it's reaching its peak and everything is coming to an end, but I didn't feel like I had received any "This is it!" signals by the time the credits rolled. Everything felt unresolved and vague, and the problems didn't just lie with the Smaug story thread, either. Gandalf is last seen in a cage being carried away to some ambiguous place by a bunch of orcs, but the stakes aren't clearly presented and the audience isn't given much reason to care. Legolas is last seen chasing an orc captain on horseback away from Laketown and the same flaws apply there as well. If anything, this is the point where it feels like the action is rising and things are kicking into high gear. Instead, the audience is treated to a black screen and all the wind is sucked out of the sails.

10. On the list of "The 10 Things that The Desolation of Smaug is About," Bilbo would have to be number 8 or 9.
Beyond everything I've criticized, this is the point that puts the nail in the coffin for me. The Hobbit is Bilbo's story. It's as simple as that. If there's one thing that's true of An Unexpected Journey, it's that when Bilbo is on screen, the movie is alive and well. His Journey is the heart of the story, and when we start looking over at Radagast riding around on his rabbit sled, it's clear that the movie has mixed up its priorities.
There's a reason why The Desolation of Smaug feels aimless, random, disconnected and inconsequential. It has no heart, no core, no unifying element that ties it all together. Why? Because Bilbo is a background character, relegated to comedic relief and errand-running. I would guess that his overall screen time adds up to about half of what it was in the first film, if that. Bilbo is no more fleshed out than any of the dwarves when it comes down to it; even Kili seems to get more attention with the silly Tauriel subplot. Jackson makes feeble attempts to highlight Bilbo's growing attachment to the ring, but the movie loses sight of that all too quickly. Yes, Bilbo has his big scene with Smaug, but he's just an errand boy who survives because of dumb luck instead of his wits. I got the same feeling watching Smaug as I did watching The Dark Knight Rises; that sinking realization of "Wow, Batman hasn't been around for a while... and I'm two thirds into the movie." I don't even understand how this happened, how such a grievous error was made on the part of the writers and the director.

The Desolation of Smaug has me scared, because I'm starting to see The Hobbit trilogy veering off onto a road that runs parallel to the Star Wars prequels, and that's frightening territory. It's very clear now that The Hobbit can't (and shouldn't) sustain three films. The material isn't there, and what we're stuck with now is an ungainly beast of its own making that lacks the finesse and purity of Tolkien's work.
With all of this said, I am fully aware that films like this are very difficult to produce. They're endlessly complicated and stressful to make, and I still respect Peter Jackson, if only for the fact that he made the LoTR trilogy, King Kong, and a serviceable Hobbit movie. But it feels like Smaug is the beginning of the end for Jackson, serving as a perfect example of what happens when a director completely loses sight of what his film actually is.