Movie review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Let’s get this right on the record: I loved this movie, and in fact, I loved it more than the first one.
Picoreview: Overall a tighter experience than the first one, without the need to do all the setup, and there was much less superfluous action. There’s a lot more changes to the core Hobbit storyline that yeah, diehard purists will definitely object to-I’ve already heard and read a lot of those objections. With wry apologies to the purists, I don’t share those objections. Every one of the changes totally worked for me in the context of the story Jackson’s telling in this movie, so I have no qualms about them whatsoever.
Which means that yes, as I pretty much expected would be the case, I am ABSOLUTELY a Tauriel fangirl.
Overall my expectations, set by the first movie, were in the B- range. I was so delighted by so much of what I saw in this second installment that I gotta bump up its grade to a B+, though!
So let’s get into the deets, shall we? Shining starlight-colored spoilers behind the cut!
Above-cut ETA: Dara has her review post up now right over here, in which she brings up the point about Tolkien’s work as a mythos, and myths getting changed and reinterpreted. And which she also points out very correctly that representation does matter, and that’s a big big plus for having Tauriel in the movie.
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Mirrored from angelahighland.com.