Self wrote:Like I said, it didn't ruin anything for me. But, it was blatant.
you mean the scenes with the dragon?
I dislike 3d, and there were scenes where i had to angle my head slightly to line things up. I also wear glasses so I had the glasses on glasses thing going.
Regarding the stuff with Smaug towards the end, I like the dwarf chase through the mountains, and think it was appropriate for these characters. The movies, and the source material really, ram home in a pretty heavy handed way the whole 'power and greed corrupt' theme--and it's not just that it makes you evil. It destroys what is best in you and diminishes what is most exemplary within you
This plays out in a number of ways in LOTR related to political power and possession of the ring. In the Hobbit we really see it with Smaug and Thorin in response to their greed and lust for gold. In theory Thorin is an inspiring leader (we could see more of that, I agree) who engenders this really deep loyalty from the people who follow him. But as he gets closer to reclaiming the treasure horde we see him start to lose that, and he's willing to sacrifice his friends in the name of the wealth that undid his ancestors. We even get a scene where Balin (that's the old guy, right?) explicitly points it out to us.
The same thing happens with Smaug--as soon as there is even a chance that bilbo might escape with some of his wealth he loses his shit and his cleverness, his cunning, his intellect, all that stuff is consumed by his lust for it. Knowing that Thorin is there just makes it all worse, because in Tolkien's aristocratic world kings have power just by virtue of being kings. The fact that it's just a handful of dwarves who can't possibly harm or threaten him is irrelevant. The king being there not only challenges whether or not his hold over the horde is legitimate, it actually threatens it in some quasi-mystical way.
This is the nature of the world that the books are situated in. The screenplay and direction is pretty faithful to that. It may be stupid, but that's the source material. That's the problem with the dwarves, too. Tolkien's characterizations are hideously weak to begin with, but at least in LOTR the major characters are differentiated by race and story arcs. The Hobbit basically has 3 characters. It has Gandalf, Bilbo, and Thorin. The other dwarves are utterly interchangable (they have different color cloaks, which is about the extent to which Tolkien thought about them), and exist soley so Thorin has people to lead and the principle characters have people they can save. They're bumbling and pathetic, and that's all the story asks of them. So Jackson et all are in a tough position--there's no room in the story for these people to be characters unless you give them something to do (the acting is fine), but every time you do that you end up weaving in new stories that can't help but feel less important to the main arc.
So its a problem, but its a limit imposed on Jackson by the story that I think he can't really be blamed for. After watching the two movies it became much clearer to me that the interchangable nature of most of the dwarves (there's the fat one, the old one, the tough one, the wise one, the sexy one, the brother of the sexy one, one is a healer for some reason, and 5 others I can't even pretend to recall), wasn't really the problem. True we don't care about them but we don't need to care about them. The story doesn't depend on it, since most of their interactions are as a pack of dwarves, rather than differentiated individuals. The problem in the first film was the pacing, the fact that precious little happened, and that what did wasn't all that exciting. Really the only excellent parts of the first film was the bilbo/golumn exchange and the fight in the burning trees. there were far more memorable scenes and sequences in this second film
1. The ringwraith crypt was cool
2. I really enjoyed the necromancer/gandalf conflict
3. The reveal of the wood elf city/prison, etc was nicely done. We already knew Rivendell
4. The spiders were well done
5. I really enjoyed the barrel sequence. It was absurd, but it was also largely shot that way
6. Bilbo and Smaug was fantastic
7. I liked the feel of laketown. Not sure the politics was necessary, but I think that is also setting up a payoff in the next film, so we'll see
8. I enjoyed seeing Smaug rampaging through Erabor, in part because of how it turned him into this seething violent engine of destruction.
9. I liked watching Tauriel.
10. I liked the running fight with Legolas and Tauriel with the elves. Legolas is still largely featureless, but he's a bit more savage here, and since his only role seems to be to kill things in slick and graceful ways, it works a bit better.
There really wasn't anything I didn't like, other than perhaps some of the cuts during bilbo and smaug. But that was more because that was the best sequence in either film, more than any issue with what they were cutting to, and I never felt, when they got back to B+S, that it had lost momentum.
That's pretty much most of the film
