Oh dear God, where to begin? The latest installment in Peter Jackson’s nerdgasm series is the cinematic equivalent of a mugging; in the sense that both will leave you angry and with an empty wallet. Not many other movies this year have made me want to leave the theater, but this certainly came close, with bad CGI, ridiculous action scenes, an incoherent and scattershot plotline, and MORE OF THE FUCKING WHISPERY FOREST-ELF PEOPLE. One would think that Peter Hackson would have at least made an effort to fix some of the problems that have plagued his other outings in Middle Earth, but unfortunately as long as he keeps making money, he will see no need to shake things up. Hopefully I can dissuade some of you from wasting your money on this with this review.
Continuing where the previous Hobbit movie left off, The Desolation of Smaug follows Bilbo Baggins and the group of dwarves he is travelling with as they complete their quest to reach the Lonely Mountain and reclaim the dwarve’s homeland. Contrary to what the title would lead you to believe, there are very few hobbits in this movie, with Bilbo showing up only about forty percent of the time. The rest of this load of anus is devoted to dwarves in barrels, laughable acting, and horrible action. I’d love to say something positive about this movie, but even the visuals suck, which is incredible to me. When Jackson pans across a landscape, the camera blurs everything together and makes the audience’s eyes water. The final action scene between the dwarves and the dragon Smaug is so chaotic it might actually give you a headache. Everything on the screen is so utterly incoherent that you stop paying attention. I never thought I’d say this about a movie as loud as The Desolation of Smaug, but I nearly fell asleep. It was boring as fuck.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the movie is almost three hours long, and that about half of that time is devoted to shit I couldn’t care less about. It juggles way too many plots, including Bilbo and the dwarves, Gandalf and Sauron, elf-girl and Legolas, the dwarves that got left behind, the white orc, Radagast, the dragon, some king of a fucking shantytown... the list goes on. The movie shifts its focus to another plot about every five minutes, and the biggest problem is that nobody actually gives a shit about the family lineage of some guy on a boat. It’s ridiculous. The Harry Potter movies are bad because they try to cram hundreds of pages of text into a short time span, but The Hobbit movies have the exact opposite problem: They try to stretch one tiny book out over THREE WHOLE MOVIES, each of which is THREE HOURS LONG. Jackson tries to pack the time with scenes that drag on way too long (including a barrel-riding sequence that you will have to grit your teeth to get through), but in the end we’re left with a loosely constructed movie that goes all over the place when it should have one specific focus: THE FUCKING DWARVES AND THEIR FUCKING TREASURE. And I don’t even care too much about that.
I’m also blown away that Peter Jackson, the guy who once pioneered motion-capture technology with Gollum in the original LOTR trilogy, approved CGI as bad as this. Again, I am forced to bring up that brutally bad final sequence with the dragon in the mines. The bubbling liquid gold looks like it’s taken straight from a screensaver from 1995. And when the dwarves move about, they look like video game characters plucked from Skyrim or League of Legends. They don’t look normal, and their weirdly airbrushed appearance is somewhat unsettling. It also doesn’t help that there are way too many of them, so instead of giving each of them some kind of characterization, Jackson just lets them all be bland, completely ignoring the fact that most of them even exist. If you look up “Pointless Character” in the Dictionary of Film, you should find a picture of Dwalin and Balin. With the exceptions of Thorin, Thorin’s son, and that one old guy whose only purpose is to explain the plot to the audience, the dwarves don’t really matter.
Then this thing attempts to sell us on the notion of an elf girl falling in love with some dwarf, even though he is virtually no different from his brother. Seriously, why pick Fili over Kili? Or maybe it was the other way around... not like anybody cares. Nothing the characters do makes any sense, at the end of the day, but this is most obvious when Smaug corners Bilbo, monologues for a moment, and then leaves to destroy a whole town when he could have easily incinerated him and not had to worry about him later. At this point, I’m not picking the movie apart, because anyone with half a brain will notice these idiotic plot holes.
And then there’s the action. Oh no, not the action. Amazingly, the only things more boring than the characters talking in this movie are the action scenes, which are jumbled and absolutely chaotic. Legolas is cool, sure, but he reaches a point in this movie of “too perfect.” How the fuck can anyone do what he does? Sure, he’s an elf, but I don’t think ANYONE can hop across a river by jumping on the heads of dwarves in barrels who are MOVING WITH THE CURRENT. These scenes are only there to get a chuckle from the audience, but I found myself staring with my mouth open at its total badness. It is so clearly CGI, so obviously fake, that the people who animated Skyline should get a pass. Yeah-- I WENT THERE.
I don’t think that people who like these movies are stupid (although I did have to fight the urge to yell at the geeks in their Hobbit costumes at the evening showing I went to). I think that their fandom just blinds them from seeing the truth. If you’re willing to not care about characters, plot, dialogue, or anything else that makes a movie good, I’m sure you’ll have a fun time. But for everyone who bothers being even a tad analytical, the jarring defects of this movie will be crystal clear. Some of its writing is on the level of The Room, with lines of dialogue such as “I am fire! I am... DEATH!” Good God! Some poor slob somewhere actually WROTE that! And what’s even worse, that didn’t get edited out of the script! You know how I say that sometimes a line of dialogue will bring down a movie’s score by a whole point? Yep, that’s a perfect example.
Final Score for the Desolanus of Smaug: 1/10 stars. Yeah, there are literally no redeeming qualities in this monumental pile of filth and garbage. Fanboys will delight at this, but for the uninitiated, consider this a warning: Peter Jackson is now in the point of no return of full-on fan-fiction. This is why Star Wars geeks aren’t writing Episode VII: BECAUSE THEY WOULD GO ABSOLUTELY OVER THE TOP WITH IT. So why in the world would this insane Tolkein dickrider be allowed to direct this? Mainly because he’s giving his fellow fanboys what they want: A mindless distraction from their own crushing virginity.
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