Review: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, A Hell Of A Ride

When last year's The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey hit, I addressed the central question being asked by most fans of the Lord of the Rings films: "How could something so relatively slight, an explicitly childish work that's little more than a richly populated retelling of the Beowulf myth, live up to the scope of the LOTR trilogy?"

I argued that the first Hobbit film did exactly what it needed to do, resetting the stage for another set of films, similar works with obvious echoes but very much their own pieces of the puzzle. This is a mighty journey, so there's bound to be a considerable amount of baggage. For many, the first Hobbit film felt superfluous, and talk of the expansion of the slight novel was dismissed as mere folly or a cash grab on the part of Jackson and company.

For those disposed to this negative sentiment, the fifth film in this series will do little to disabuse you of those notions. For The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is, on first blush, more of the same. We've got more traipsing dwarves, more action sequences, more somber intoning by wizards, and many, many more shots of the seemingly extraterrestrial vistas of New Zealand.

Yet I say this explicitly, not as a fanboy or someone blind to the Jacksonian quirks that some find tedious: if you don't like The Desolation of Smaug, if you're honest you probably didn't like the Lord of the Rings films very much, either. For even more so than the previous outing, this chapter feels very much like a (welcome) expansion on the world that the original trilogy helped create. The Tolkienian landscape is a rich one with many places to explore, and I for one refuse to begrudge these extraordinary filmmakers taking more of my time to delve into the nooks and crannies of this rich narrative.

While the last film opened with a prologue similar to The Fellowship of the Ring, this one opens with a flashback almost similar to the one used in The Return of the King, with a setting that equally reminds very much of Aragorn's introduction to the saga. This brief prologue, along with other elements later in the film, provide direct cues to the greater whole. For some, this may feel derivative, but as anyone who has ever delved into Tolkien's world, these ripples-through-time practically define his master work. It's exactly these connections, through rich genealogies and throwaway lines of inter-connectivity, that hint at the vast constellation of characters and histories that Tolkien reveled in.