The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
We are leaving for the beautiful Austrian Alps tomorrow, so the next days will be busy. Time to kill the backlog of one single movie! Watching “The Hobbit” has become something special. 2012 was a year in which Pip and I discovered a newfound love for movie theaters and watching big screen action extravaganzas on them. In 2013 it was much harder to continue this tradition due to the arrival of O, but happily, we were able to watch “The Hobbit” again shortly after it came out. Continuing last year’s tradition also, this year’s Hobbit is the last movie I would be seeing in this year. (Or rather, blogging in this year.) It is possible, though unlikely, that we will watch a movie in the Austrian Alps. Movie-wise, I predict that next year will actually start with Jim Jarmusch’s newest film, when Loris gets back from his Christmas vacation.
This year, Pixelmatsch also dragged us into the HFR version, and thinking back, I don’t think I remember it very well. Sure the film looked bombastic and beautiful, and I am still such a sucker for the whole Middle-Earth esthetic, but I probably couldn’t tell the difference. Then again, I was actually quite immersed into the story, and that can only be a good thing.
Despite my memory of the film being rather engaging, I was not exactly happy with it. We had an intermission (very randomly, really) after roughly 1 1/2 hours into the film, when they just arrived into Laketown, and very unfortunately, the first 1 1/2 hours were better. For almost every two-parted opera or ballet (Gisèle is the best example!), the second part is better than the first, but for this Hobbit movie it does not seem to be the case. I was happy to see that the film did not have any huge fight scenes with massive armies (as the second Lord of the Rings did), but it got replaced with 10 dwarves running around having Smaug chase them pointlessly. We knew that they were all going to survive it, so what’s the point? How does it make any sense that Smaug can go on destroying a city but somehow he’s not able to get ahold of a small bunch of dwarves?
The wood elves were also a disappointment. I expected to see more of them, and not this mildly silly focus on a single one of them. I remember having facepalmed a few times when, especially when the Kili-Tauriel relationship peaked at that “I am going to save him”-moment. Pixelmatsch and mingoshingo completely forgot that Legolas didn’t even appear in the Hobbit book – this is how omnipresent he was in the movie. Terrible.
Last year, I had really strong feelings for the Hobbit adaptation. It was a revival of my childhood, especially with me re-reading the book in its entirety in preparation to watch the film, and this year, I thought I’d do it again. I watched the first Lord of the Rings film in theaters multiple times, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends (including mingoshingo), and so a part of me expected to relive these childhood memories again. Luckily, the nostalgia made me still feel very fond towards the new Hobbit film, but considering how much I had to say about the first film last year, I guess the experience paled the second time around – much like the second Lord of the Rings film paled in comparison to the first.