I Saw Another Hobbit

About a hundred years ago I posted after seeing Peter Jackson's first Hobbit movie.  At the time I gave it a decent grade, but over time my impressions soured and I became less and less enchanted.  Too much silliness, too broad; too much fighting, too little Hobbiting.

Now I'm just back from seeing The Hobbit Part 2: The Desolation of Smaug: The Desolationing with my son and his friends for his 10th birthday.

This movie *is* better than the first. While it suffers from a lot of the same action-movie excess, there is also more atmosphere and less absurdly broad humor. There's no loopy Radagast Jar-Jar business here, and no full equivalent to the roller-coaster ride through Goblin Town. It's telling that this movie is nearly as long as the first but feels much shorter.

Deviations from the beloved-children's-book-that-wasn't-quite-yet-a-prequel-and-that-I-read-almost-a-dozen-times abound.  Here are my spoiler-heavy impressions:

1) Legolas exists (which he didn't in JRRT's Hobbit), and he gets screen time across the whole second half of the movie.  It's definitely more than the cameo some of us expected.  Of course his presence in Mirkwood does make sense; he is the son of King Thranduil, who rules there.

This movie's Legolas is kind of dour and severe--there's nothing of the charm and wide-eyed wonder seen in the LOTR movies.

2) The female wood elf Tauriel is invented from whole cloth for the movie and is almost a major character.  She is romantically linked to Legolas but somehow falls for Kili, presumably because he is The Sexy Dwarf.  This dwarf-elf attraction would be more interesting if it didn't seem completely unearned.  I don't mean the basic fact of Dwarf-Elf mutual racism but that Kili seems to win Tauriel's attention with a joke about what's down his pants.

She follows the dwarves to Lake-town and ends up using the Athelas plant to save the wounded Kili from a Morgul blade in a weirdly complete and unnecessary prefiguration of Arwen healing Frodo in LOTR.

Despite her odd role in the plot, I quite like her as a character.  If elves are generally androgynous anyway, female elves ought to kick as much ass as male ones.

3) Jackson hints very early at the power of the ring over Bilbo.  Bilbo drops the ring, then fights like a madman to get it back from one of the spiders in Mirkwood.  Afterwards, we see his mingled relief and horror at his own violence, and already we have the sense that the ring is pulling at him.

Nothing like this appears in the book, but it makes perfect sense and fits very nicely we everything we know about the ring.  I like this moment a lot.

4) I love PJ's depiction of the Woodland Realm. Thranduil has an edge of sexy menace that actually works.  Wood elves are supposed to be somewhat more feral than their high-elf kin, so they ought to be this dangerous.  Also, playing down Tolkien's oddly Edwardian drunk-scene dialogue between the Butler and Chief Guard was the right choice.

5) Rather than escaping Thranduil's realm in sealed barrels, the dwarves ride out in open barrels and must survive a running battle between orcs who are trying to kill them and elves who are trying to recapture them.  This is just another excuse for a heavy action sequence with lots of 3-D, but it's also plenty fun.  The sealed barrels of the book are memorable, but they wouldn't make great cinema.

Later on the dwarves do get covered up in the barrels another way, which is funny.

5) Gandalf's investigation of the Necromancer (who is actually Sauron) is not depicted in The Hobbit but is based on canonical explanations.  As shown here, Sauron is building an army of orcs in Mirkwood, which I don't recall as being part of the standard history.  This implies that the orcs who will be fighting at the Battle of Five Armies are in Sauron's power rather than simply pursuing their own nasty interests as (IIRC) they're doing in the book.

I do wish the movie had given us less Orlando Bloom and more Sir Ian.

7) Also more Stephen Fry, please.  He is wonderful as the Master of Lake-town (a locale that emerges with far more personality and feeling here than it did in the book).  His oily little minion is also excellent, a sort of Blackadder version of Grima Wormtongue.

8) Azog's orcs, who have been pursuing Thorin's company throughout both movies, infiltrate Lake-town and attack the dwarves there (or at least the ones who are left behind there because of Kili's wound).  This is an excuse for more fighting and more heroics by Legolas/Tauriel, who are also unexpectedly at Lake-town.  I found this to be a distraction from the real drama.

9) Smaug is excellent:  majestic and terrifying.  This is exactly how a dragon ought to be, inside Tolkien or out.

10) At the end of the movie, PJ inserts a long and complicated fight between the dwarves and Smaug at the Mountain before the dragon heads off to attack Lake-town.  This is the one part of the movie I absolutely didn't like.  The violence is far too over-the-top and features some unbelievable and silly dwarf "ingenuity" being used against the dragon.  In the end it comes to nothing anyway.  I wish this part had been cut entirely.

11) Most of all, Martin Freeman is a perfect Bilbo Baggins. He is full of clever wonder and appropriate dismay, finding his way in a strange and dangerous world that is no longer entirely new to him. The movie suffers from every moment that he is not on screen or is relegated to the background.