The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

“Come now, don’t be shy…Step into the light.”

Oh, the chills…

If you haven’t gone to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug yet, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and get to that.

One of the most intense and epic movies of the entire Middle-earth movie series Peter Jackson has taken on from the most respectable J.R.R. Tolkien, The Desolation of Smaug keeps viewers on the edge of their seat from the beginning right through to the end.

A lot of people, like me, were excited when they decided to split The Hobbit into two different movies. While the book barely hits 300 pages in most versions (I’ve seen, anyway), a lot happens in between the lines that need to be extended on the screen. The book version of The Hobbit is almost pure storytelling…A lot of what Tolkien does in that book is “tell” the reader what is happening…And since, technically, The Hobbit is Bilbo’s autobiography passed down to his nephew, Frodo, the writing style works still into the present day, where we’re used to a more “show don’t tell” aspect of our readings and writings.

But then, a lot of people, like me, were not excited when they decided to split it into a trilogy. I understood what they were trying to as far as capture some of the backstory from the Appendices found in The Lord of the Rings, but I still wasn’t sure how they were going to make a 9 hour movie out of a 300 page book. I tried to suppress my fears, hoping once I had seen the first movie, I wouldn’t be worried about it and all of my fears would be quelled.

They weren’t.

It took me a while to appreciate the first movie, because I still wasn’t sure how they were going to split it into two more.

And then The Desolation of Smaug happened.

I have so much I want to say about this movie, but I’m pretty sure anything I’d want to talk about would be a totally rough spoiler alert. Perhaps some of the fears about the series in general I was worried they were going to ruin that they didn’t:

Smaug. Good Lord, I was worried about the talking dragon. How does one make an epic dragon talk and not look totally cheesy and animated?

You hand the task to Peter Jackson, that’s how.

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, and you’re scared of how they’re going to deal with Smaug…don’t be. I don’t want to ruin any surprises, but they shocked me.

Covering too much of the book and not having enough for the third movie.

This was definitely my biggest fear, especially with how much they covered in the first movie. Pretty much think of it this way: They covered the first 1/3 of the book in the first movie, throwing in all this backstory that, at the time of the original release, really seemed pointless. A lot of us were hopeful, I think, that Peter Jackson wouldn’t let us down (and the pressure on him was enormous), but the first movie didn’t do much to soften a lot of our fears.

This movie covers the middle portion of the book, and as one of my friends said after we watched this, Peter Jackson is making this trilogy adventure-adventure-action. Meaning, we think the first two movies are going to be more about the adventure they’re on and the obstacles in their way, leaving all of the pure action to the end. Kind of like how they split up The Deathly Hallows. Get all of the “boring” necessary crap out of the way (“boring” in quotes because it’s not actually boring, but all backstory is in its own unique way) to lead up to the climax. Whereas The Lord of the Rings was a lot like adventure-action-action.

That’s the biggest difference in these trilogies, and when the third one wraps up next year, I’m completely and totally confident this trilogy will act as a beautiful segue into The Lord of the Rings movies, and serve as a much better prequel than Star Wars most certainly, and definitely with much more finesse than a lot of us leery fans were expecting.

 

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Cover Image found: http://www.containsmoderateperil.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug-banner-2.jpg

Smaug picture found: http://screenrobot.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/desolation-of-smaug-dragon.jpg

Barrel Hobbits found: http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/The-Hobbit-The-Desolation-of-Smaug-19.jpg