***
Picking up where the last film
left off, ‘DoS’ follows the journey of the homeless dwarves and their quest to
regain their homeland, and their adventures through Mirkwood and Lake Town.
I’m not angry, I’m just
disappointed. Unlike the rest of the world, I rather enjoyed ‘An Unexpected
Journey’ despite its problems, but with ‘DoS’ Jackson really takes the biscuit.
To start with, the narrative is all over the place: the meeting with Beorn is
over in the first ten minutes of the film; Bilbo only features as a central
character at the beginning and the end (if indeed, there is a beginning and an
end); and too much time is spent on aspects that Jackson has completely
fabricated. By now everyone will know that there is a completely new female
elf, Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), added to the story, who has the most contrived
‘romance’ with dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) which goes on forever and is
completely cringe-worthy. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) also makes an appearance when
the dwarves are in Mirkwood, which makes some degree of sense as he is
Thranduil’s (Lee Pace) son, but he is given far too much screen time and the
film could easily have done without him and Tauriel. At the end of the film, we
eventually get to see Smaug, but this section of the film goes on for an
extremely long time – the original delight at seeing the dragon in all his
glory soon wears thin, and the methods that the dwarves then use to try and
destroy him in the mountain are completely ridiculous. There is also an
unhealthy obsession on getting as many references to ‘The Lord of the Rings’
films in as possible, which only reminded me of how great that trilogy is and
how much this film was struggling. The film also divides the dwarf company in
two about half way through the film, which is completely unfounded in the text
and just doesn’t work! It was so completely enraging! I accept that a film is a
different medium to a novel, but for it to be faithful to the text it needs to
keep the main plot points constant, and by dividing the main group up Jackson
is just tearing a whole in Tolkien’s work.
The editing also feels very poor –
there are some scene changes where the camera work is very lazy. In the
sequence where the dwarves escape downstream, the camera plunges in and out of
the water but the pixel resolution changes and makes it look as though it were
filmed on a camera phone, and not the new sort.
Not all Jackson’s additions are
dreadful, however – Bard (Luke Evans) is given more of a backstory and we are
allowed to get to know him as a character, something which is lacking in the
source material. Similarly, the inclusion of Gandalf’s journey to uncover the
truth about the re-emerging presence of evil is engaging and genuinely creepy
in places, but the film struggles when flicking between this narrative and that
of the dwarves. The film works best when it focuses on Bilbo (the excellent
Martin Freeman) but even he is overshadowed in the middle of the film by the
excessively fast pace and focus on the visual. There are some very interesting
moments at the start of the film where Bilbo’s addiction to the Ring is
explored, and this thread then reappears at the end but there is not enough of
this. Thorin’s addiction to gold is similarly mentioned, but only in brief.
I cannot hate this film and
wholly dismiss it, however – these are characters who I have been acquainted with
and it is mostly well made and all the actors do well, but it is definitely the
cinematic disappointment of the year.
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