purplecat | The Desolation of Smaug (Reply)

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That was a distinctly odd viewing experience.

Taken by its own lights The Desolation of Smaug is a perfectly reasonable fantasy film. It's a little too fond of its action sequences but that's true of most such movies so, you know. I just couldn't help wondering half way through, why Peter Jackson was making The Hobbit when he obviously wasn't interested in making The Hobbit?

For all their flaws, you can tell that Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies are attempting to stay true to the spirit of the original (albeit as perceived by Jackson et al) and care is being taken to reproduce all the iconic moments.

The Desolation of Smaug, even more so than whatever the first one was called, drastically trims much of the material in the book, if it is not radically altering it. At one point we were wondering how Jackson could possibly extend the book to three movies if he was pruning quite so viciously - only to have an entirely new sub-plot about Laketown politics thrown at us.

I've nothing against the Laketown politics, they are quite interesting in their own right, but at the end of day it felt like Jackson wanted to make a movie about elf/dwarf/human politics and wasn't really interested in anything else that was going on the book.

I went googling to see what other people thought and was most struck by a comment in (I think a Telegraph) review, which observed that Jackson really wanted to make a prequel to his own Lord of the Rings movies, not The Hobbit. Viewed through that lens, The Desolation of Smaug is doing its job in a slightly long-winded way, but it is a lot further from The Hobbit itself than his Lord of the Rings movies were from their originals.

Crossposts: http://louisedennis.livejournal.com/266866.html

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purplecat

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