From the studio
that brought you The Lord of the Rings
comes the new trilogy of The Hobbit,
the second installment of which, The
Desolation of Smaug, was released on December 13th to great
fanfare. Imprint Staff members went to view the film as soon as it was released,
and were impressed and surprised at how the film was created. We are now joined
by staff members Duncan McLeod and Andy Griscom, who saw the film together and
have very strong opinions about several of the design changes made by the
studio.
[Editor’s note: This is not a review. It is a
conversation. It contains spoilers.]
Andy: So, The Hobbit. It was an interesting movie.
You had to suspend your disbelief for a good chunk of the movie, but it still
managed to keep me amused. What did you think, Duncan?
Duncan: I found it
to be a remarkable movie, though in contrast to your “suspension of disbelief,”
pretty much all movies do that. This one just might have required it a bit more
than some people prefer. Yet overall,
most anything straying from reality was done to make the movie more epic and
grandiose.
Andy: Certainly it
was, and I do agree with you there, it did make the movie better from an
entertainment standpoint. But there is a limit to that. I have no problem with
making things more epic for a great audience reaction, but after a certain
point it just becomes annoying. Case in point; all of the Lord of the Rings characters, none of whom appear in the Hobbit book, who were just thrown into
the movie to get a reaction out of Lord
of the Rings fans. Enough! You guys got your own movies, go away and let
these guys have theirs!
Duncan: The Hobbit
was a prequel movie; therefor it needs material to tie it into the Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson
essentially created more of a lead-in to the Lord of the Rings, like how he showed us what the Necromancer was
doing for the duration of the movie, which in the book was just kind of left to
the reader’s imagination.
Andy: I see where
you’re coming from here, and it is kind of nice to not just have Gandalf
disappear for half the time; we actually see what he’s up to, not just having
it mentioned offhandedly after the fact. But a good chunk of the other stuff
wasn’t needed. Legolas showing up in the forest? Makes a little sense; it was
mentioned in the books that he was from Mirkwood. Having him save the gang from
an orcish ambush (that also wasn’t in the book, but we’ll ignore that)? Okay
Legolas, you got your screen time. Let us follow the people we actually came to
see a movie about. Having him follow the gang all the way to Laketown and save
them from more orcish hunters? Okay, enough already! Just go away! I came to
see a movie about a gang of insane dwarves and a kleptomaniac midget, not to
watch Orlando Bloom dancing around shooting orcs from the top of peoples heads!
Duncan: That does
hit the upper limit of what I can take for changes on the book, however, it was
done to add a level of characterization to Bolg, son of Azog, the most feared
of orc hunters, beyond the level of just saying “Oh yeah, that guy is a scary
person,” meanwhile, who better to test an orc heir than an elvish one? So I
feel that the changes made not just improved tie-ins, but extended on J.R.R.
Tolkien’s original introduction to Bolg.
Andy: That’s
actually another thing that annoyed me. Who the heck is Azog? He never appeared
in the book, that’s for sure. The character Bolg in the book appeared for like
five minutes at the very end, leading the combined armies of every goblin
kingdom in the North. He showed up, wrecked some stuff, and then died. End of
story. There was no race against the orcs to get to the Lonely Mountain, or a
revenge subplot going on in the background. It was the story of a group of
dwarves traveling across the world, and the hazards they encountered along the
way. The goblins were just another one of those hazards, nothing more.
Duncan: Once
again, this is Peter Jackson’s unique approach to characterization. He gets to turn one book into three movies,
have twice as many epic scenes, and the people watching get to see a better
demonstration of the bad guy’s character than something along the lines of a
made-up history lecture, which many of Tolkien’s works can feel like. However, I do feel that the matter of the
black arrow is of great importance. In
the original book, the “black arrow” was a family heirloom, passed on to bard
by his father, and it was essentially used as a fluke, the arrow had never
missed, and bard used as his final arrow, hoping that he would be able to hit
his mark. However, the movie changes
this idea. Instead of the black arrow
being some relic of an ancient line of archers, now it was some dwarven
invention created only to be fired from a “dwarven windlass” (fancy giant
crossbow with four limbs instead of two) that was created for dragon
slaying. Now this blatantly contradicts
the idea of the black arrow as some sign that Gideon’s line (bards family) was
blessed, and the fact that the dwarves never prepared for any dragon, and lost
to Smaug because they had no such weapon.
Andy: Yeah, that
annoyed me too. The Black Arrow was supposed to be some sort of magical,
blessed, kill-whatever-you-shoot-this-thing-at arrow, not a mass-produced,
glorified ballista bolt. And there just happened to be the weapon required to
shoot it in Laketown, ready to go as needed, yet they didn’t bother to stock it
with Black Arrows, which the thing was designed
to fire. Not the smartest people, are they?
Duncan: So, the
Black Arrow was a bit too much to take.
I feel that one of the strongest scenes, and the hardest to really
believe, is the fight with Smaug near the end. To see them taunt a dragon into lighting
furnaces, use the Dragon’s natural obsession with gold as a weapon against him,
to see them running like madmen and working in unison to take their revenge, is
perhaps one of the most impressive parts of the movie. Plus, there were explosives, and even more fun
watching people fly around on pulley systems!
Andy: I do agree,
it did look very impressive. Plus my favorite scene of the entire movie (Thorin
surfing a river of molten gold on a wheelbarrow) came from that part. But it
was also the part that strained belief to the greatest degree. The fact that
the group had a live dragon, who happened to be fighting on his home turf and
with a massive advantage in fighting power, chasing them all around for almost
twenty minutes, trying his best to kill them, and not a single one was even injured, was a little much for me to
take. I could understand that happening if they were sneaking around and trying
not to get caught, but these dwarves were maintaining an average distance of
some twenty feet away from the dragon. Words do not do justice to how horrendous an idea like that is, but it
worked out just fine for them. Even Thorin, who, as earlier stated was surfing
a river of molten gold at the time, had to run under Smaug’s legs in order to shred those waves. In fact, now that
I think of it, the only time anyone
gets hurt in the entire movie was when Fili got shot during the escape from the
elves by one of the ten thousand orcs
that snuck through the heart of elvish territory because, wait for it…, they needed to give that elf chick a reason
to follow the dwarves to Laketown, in order to continue the romance subplot
that they just threw into the movie because… well actually they had no reason.
So yeah, that was stupid.
Duncan: True
enough, the strange romance is totally unnecessary. But if the argument is that adding extra
material to a great movie that does entertain is a bad thing, then all of the
Lord of the Rings movies, and the previous Hobbit movie, are in fact all
bad. The point is: how much material can
be crammed into a three part movie totaling about 9 or 10 hours, in the Lord of
the Rings that meant taking material out, in The Hobbit that meant adding more
material. The easiest way to do this is
add more prequel material for The Lord of the Rings. Essentially the romance between Fili and
Tauriel (the elf chick) acts both as entertaining material and more reason for
Legolas (Orlando Bloom) to have an unusual hatred for Dwarves. However, I do believe that we can agree that
extending the scenes with Smaug is worthwhile because of the sheer quality of
Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice acting and the animation detail.
Well, let’s wrap
this up before we turn this into a 9
hour trilogy. Despite all of the massive plot holes, it was still a very
entertaining movie, which, when you come down to it, is what movies are
supposed to do. Suspension of disbelief is something that just comes with the
territory. Nonetheless, it was a good movie and we strongly recommend going and
seeing it.
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