With Smaug, Jackson opens up the story in an attempt to create a bigger universe, much like he did with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the tale is too slight to support the added weight, and the focus and impetus are lost.
The now-infamous 30-minute dinner scene that opened the previous film, An Unexpected Journey, seemed to confirm those suspicions (early in Smaug, when the dwarves sat down for a meal, I gripped my armrests and braced for the worst, but fortunately it turned out to just be a snack). When Jackson announced he was going to adapt Tolkien’s 300-page novel into three films instead of the originally announced two, fans grumbled about studio greed and artistic indulgence. The same cannot be said for the bulk of Smaug, a bloated, dawdling and distended adventure that throws in so many extraneous characters and subplots, the eponymous hero - Bilbo Baggins - is edged off the screen for large chunks of time. It’s a showstopper.īut another part of what makes the sequence so memorable is that it also advances the story: It matters. The action is sprawling and comes at you from all angles - there’s so much happening, your eyes don’t know where to look - and director Peter Jackson throws in some terrific slapstick as a bonus, leavening the furious excitement with laughs. The setpiece is as fun and rousing as anything in Steven Spielberg’s canon. There is one thrilling, rib-tickling sequence in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: A group of dwarves, riding inside empty wine barrels over rushing rapids and waterfalls, fends off an attack by an army of orcs with the help of bow-and-arrow-wielding elves.
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