Peter Jackson makes his cameo appearance in the first few frames of The Hobbit:The Desolation of Smaug. After that Jackson takes his time dragging out the tale of a Hobbit, a Wizard, and a collection of random and interchangeable dwarfs. There is a tiny but more character development on the dwarf front, but I still can’t recall any of their names-even with one of them falling in love with an Elf. I can’t help but think of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof-a fish may love a bird, but where would they build a home?
I have to think that if Peter Jackson had been born in an age before CGI that he would have ended up selling shoes or maybe flipping burgers. As it is we have to deal with nonsense like twenty story tall gold statues and hallways tall enough for a dragon to fly through without having to duck it’s head. Uh, why would drawfs build hallways with thousand foot high ceilings? Sauron himself would have plenty of elbow room in the Kingdom Under The Mountain-and what’s holding Lonely Mountain up anyway? In addition to vast open spaces, Smaug The Pissed Off goes around knocking down support pillars left and right.
The Hobbit:The Desolation of Smaug was a pretty film to look at, but there were a few spots where the CGI was really rough and the selection halos pretty obvious. But I’ll be honest, overall the computer generated graphics were damned good.
Maybe if I had never read The Hobbit I wouldn’t mind Peter Jackson dragging the story out, adding new characters, tacking on a subplot that foreshadows The Lord of The Rings, and generally making a story that would have fit nicely in a two hour movie into a nine hour marathon.
There were all kinds of odd and silly things going on in The Hobbit:The Desolation of Smaug but one that really bugged me was when an injured Hobbit uses a bunch of loose walnuts as a pillow. Really? You can’t just roll up a towel or use a real pillow-he was in someone’s home at the time-are walnuts really the best thing they could find to put under his head?
Anyway, The Hobbit:The Desolation of Smaug was neither good nor bad, it was just there, and there, and still there a couple of hours later.
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Would have been so very very different, all of it, had the Dwarves known the lessons of medieval fortresses, ancient Biblical cities, etc: and built their mountain stronghold with the only access to the outside being small Dwarf-height tunnels.
Then, no dragon can get in. no plot. Oh well.
Nice point, but logic has seldom been a big factor in any fantasy stories.