The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins have another very long adventure
barry-normanBWWhat is it about film directors that makes them take short, classic novels and turn them into very long films? Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for instance, is a book, which, whatever edition you read, runs to fewer than 200 pages. Baz Luhrmann’s film version, however, runs for 2 hours and 23 minutes.

The New Zealander Peter Jackson, though, seems intent on breaking all records. JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a novel of some 300 or so pages; Jackson is currently turning it into a trilogy. Episode one, An Unexpected Journey, lasts 2 hours and 49 minutes; episode two, The Desolation Of Smaug, for 2 hours and 41 minutes. That’s already 5 hours and 30 minutes of film and there’s still another one to come.

Admittedly, the Desolation Of Smaug is very well made, remarkable special effects, dire peril and robust action, but somewhere into the third hour I did begin to fear that it might never end.

The story begins pretty much where the first one left off. With the help of the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) has been enlisted by a bunch of dwarfs, led by Thorin (Richard Armitage), to help them reclaim their lost mountain kingdom of Erebor from the huge and fearsome dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch).

This involves another journey through a menacing forest, down a river and across a lake, the dwarfs, meanwhile, constantly pursued by an army of Orcs, who mean them considerable harm. The Orcs are pretty frightening but even more terrifying are the giant spiders that Bilbo and company encounter in the forest.

Along the way the dwarfs meet a whole bunch of creatures who might or might not be on their side. There’s a skinchanger, who can be either a man or a bear (a sort of werebear, I suppose), the enigmatic boatman Bard (Luke Evans) and Legolas the elf (Orlando Bloom). And to fight alongside Legolas, Jackson and his co-writers have invented a female elf, quite unknown to Tolkien, called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) simply, I imagine, to have her fall for one of the dwarfs, thus injecting an unnecessary element of romance into the yarn and spinning it out even further.

The journey to Erebor takes a long time but so does the dwarfs’ eventual encounter with the fire-breathing Smaug and that’s the trouble with Jackson – he simply doesn’t know when to stop. Maybe he’s so in love with his visual creations that he can’t bear to deprive us of them even for a few minutes.

The film is good to watch in two dimensions, as I saw it, and probably more so in 3D. It looks great and the cast performs as well as actors can be expected to when surrounded by a multitude of special effects. But like its predecessor and Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, it needed a ruthless editor. I am very glad I saw it; it’s just that I wish I had seen rather less of it.