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The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

Olly Buxton by Olly Buxton
April 11, 2020
in Feature, Film Review
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
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*** Contains Spoilers ***

Rossini is supposed to have said of Wagner that he had some wonderful moments, but dreadful quarter-hours. You might say the same thing of Peter Jackson: there is something Bayreuthian about the excess of everything in his Hobbit saga. Still, he seems to have retained the confidence of the reviewing community: I wonder whether it will last another instalment.

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In the months before Ray Harryhausen’s recent passing, giants of cinema from James Cameron to Nick Park, notably including Peter Jackson, queued to salute the stop-motion king. It was Harryhausen who fired the imaginations of these young auteurs as they watched raging plasticine dinosaurs and rickety skeleton warriors duke it out with Sinbad, Jason, Raquel Welch and others across countless other corny heroic fantasies a now bygone era.

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Harryhausen was undoubtedly a matinee genius but the films he worked on were, in their day, technological more than cinematic achievements. (Sample quote, from Seventh Voyage of Sinbad: “Classic Harryhausen. May not be heavy on plot, but who cares?”)

George Lucas, a fellow Harryhausen devotee, never pretended his Star Wars franchise was anything other than straight-up homage to the comic book serials and B-grade melodramas of his youth. But Peter Jackson, for all his due deference, is supposed to have aspired to greater things. With the second instalment of his interminable Hobbit saga we now know this not to be the case: it is pure, cornball Harryhausen for the 21st century, Pentium processors replacing plastic stegosauruses but otherwise every bit as cheesy and, in the leaden sequences between cave-girl-fancying monster tortoises, just as tedious as anything from One Million Years BC.

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No doubt bored of reverend Tolkien scholarship, Jackson has started making stuff up and has oriented all drama around what his inner Harryhausen likes best: scowling orcs, growling wargs, rutting beasts, fruity elves and improbable hand-to-hand combat between the lot of them.

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As far as Tolkien was concerned there were hardly any orcs, no Sauron, few Elves and no Legolas in the Hobbit. However pleasing Evangeline Lilly’s elven features may be, Tauriel doesn’t even feature in the appendices, and she certainly didn’t flirt with any dwarves. Why Jackson felt the need to insert dreadful quarter-hours of these creatures hacking each other to bits is difficult to fathom. There are some inventive kills, but none of the action bears at all on the plot. But at least the orcs and fairies do dispose of one other: no-one can lay a finger on the dwarves, and good old Dildo lives a charmed life throughout.

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Countless other secondary characters buzz the screenplay like so many horseflies. They too could also have used a morgul blade to the chops: Stephen Fry’s walk-on is surplus to requirements, as is Legolas’, and a shape-shifting bear man, some well-rendered but time-wasting spiders, a new orc 2.I.C. and the rabbit-wizard from the first instalment (this time minus his bunny sled) do nothing but slow the progress of our dogged little dwarves.

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Finally they do reach their Lonely Mountain (sorry if this gives the game away) only to find a monologuing dragon who won’t shut up for 45 minutes and who, while anticipating their every move, somehow cannot so much as singe a ginger beard. He lies on a treasure of coins and valuables so large that he could, were he properly advised, defeat the dwarves, Shire People, Lake People, Orcs, Elves, Rohirrin and probably even Sauron himself simply by dumping his hoard of currency outside the mountain. There’s not a dark force on Earth to rival the awesome power of hyperinflation.

Meantime we wonder whether we haven’t been sold the most outrageous pup. The result of our three hours’ toil is a series of scoreless draws: Dragon versus Dwarves; Orcs versus Elves; Elves versus Dwarves; Lake People versus Dwarves; Dwarves versus Dragon; Dragon versus Hobbit; Boatman versus Lake People; Dragon versus Boatman; Necromancer versus Wizard; and Bear-shape-shifter against himself. Jackson apologists will say it is all yet to kick off but, by gum, we shouldn’t have had to wait this long for some resolution. Nine hours is not three but SIX standard-length feature films.

One ruthlessly edited feature film ought to have done the job, even if it meant Orlando Bloom and Stephen Fry missing a trip to the Land of the Long White Cloud.

Tchaikovsky said of Gotterdammerung that, after its last notes rang, he felt as though he had been let out of prison. As the feeling seeps back into your buttocks and you join the snaking queue for the loo at your local theatre, you may well know how he felt.

Director: Peter Jackson
Stars: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly
Runtime: 161 min
Country: USA, New Zealand

Film Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Tags: BENEDICT CUMBERBATCHEvangeline Lillyian mckellenmartin freemanOrlando BloomPeter JacksonRichard Armitage
Olly Buxton

Olly Buxton

Olly lives amongst the lush olive groves and cypress trees on the slopes of Mount Muswell, just north of London, where he has a thirty five acre lifestyle orchard and farm with lifetime partner Bridget and their small ('but growing!') herd of alpacas. When he's not darting around the corniches of Hamstead and Highgate on his convertible BSA motorcycle ('it's more of a cabriolet, really') or tasting his latest batch of extra virgin oil with the orchard's head oliculturalist, Ned, Olly researches for his forthcoming novel, a science fiction fantasy in which, courtesy of a time machine, it is David Bowie and not namesake Jim who is left to defend the Alamo from the siege of the Mexican Army. A committed Radical Marxist Ironist, Olly made his fortune during the world-wide anti-capitalist riots of 1999 on the back of the simple but ingenious idea: selling packed lunches and bottles of diet coke to hungry protesters at a huge mark-up. "FeedtheCommie.com", as he styled his fledgling business, quickly became an enormously profitable multinational operation, quenching thirsts and filling bellies of protesters, dissidents, exiles and other militant intellectuals during times of civil unrest and civil protest in thirty six countries around the globe, from its headquarters in Seattle. The company also secured lucrative sponsorship deals with (among others) Amnesty International, Greenpeace and the Socialist Workers' Party. Olly then consolidated his net worth by securitising the income streams from FeedtheCommie.Com, negotiating a successful IPO and selling his entire holding ('mostly to student Marxist Radicals I had befriended, I would point out') at the top of the market. As of its public debut, FeedtheCommie.com is yet to make any revenue and is currently trading at 6 per cent of its par value. Nevertheless, Olly doesn't feel too bad about the sub-class of bankrupt Marxists he has created. "It's what they would have wanted". Now the second richest man in the world, Olly has settled into a life of writing political philosophy, voyaging on journeys of self discovery ('I find something new about myself every day. This morning it was dandruff'), and ceramic painting (pointillism).

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