The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

I really liked the depiction of the wood-elves. Thranduil is portrayed as very emotional, in contrast to Elrond and Galadhriel who were more aloof, even godlike. It makes sense for the wood-elves to have lost some of their wisdom and class over the centuries of isolation in Mirkwood. I also liked the design of Laketown, pitting it against the splendor of Gondor. While Gondor, ruled by the descendants of Numenor, has a Greco-Roman feel to it, Laketown is crowded and dirty, inspired more by Middle Ages England. These other depictions of the races we are already familiar with really fleshes out the diversity of Middle-Earth. Despite the relative isolation of Dale/Laketown and the Woodland Realm from the good vs. evil battle between the realms we saw in LOTR and Mordor, the War of the Ring conflict was written into The Hobbit pretty well, which goes to show how much of a threat Mordor posed to Middle-Earth.

The depiction of dwarven civilization was nothing short of awesome. The movie really drove hard to portray the ingenuity and industriousness of the dwarves, with their mechanized mining industry and furnaces. While the elves are the race closest to Eru Iluvatar and so have the advantage of his light and grace, the dwarves built their civilization from blood and sweat. The details we see in The Hobbit emphasize the magnitude of the loss of Erebor as well as Khazad-dum, and it helped me sympathize with how much they had fallen. The death of elves feels to me like a stain on purity but the loss of a dwarven kingdom feels more like collapse and closer to home as our own world is built by human ingenuity and hard work.

In addition to the artistic design and worldbuilding, The Hobbit as a movie was also good. While I went into the movie knowing that two-and-a-half hour would be a pretty long third of The Hobbit trilogy, the pacing was good - especially towards the end. The action scenes had me roaring with laughter and kept me gripping my seat just at a loss of what craziness would come forth next. Now The Hobbit, being an action-adventure epik, might not reflect Tolkein's intention as he wrote it, but it's good at what it's designed to be: an action-adventure epik. With that being said there were inconsistencies with the book that I felt were balanced out by their entertainment value, such as the whole Azog/Orc special forces subplot. Let's face it, Erkenbrand and the Red Arrow aren't nearly as exciting as Eomer and the warning beacons. There were also inconsistencies that I find hard to explain - such as the Nazgul being portrayed as being locked in tombs only 60 years before The War of the Ring as well as Gandalf getting captured by Sauron in Dol Guldur. I guess the only thing we can do about that is leaving it as a challenge for PJ to surprise us next later this year.

(It just depicted Smaug flying toward the city