Desolation of Smaug review!
Legolas: still the prettiest.
3D: still the worst *clutches splitting head and moans*
reserved seating theater with fancy-ass recliners: still the best
Spoilers and opinions and rambling about possible dwarven philosophy and how I want to write loads of Legolas/Gimli now under the cut!
OK, so first and foremost, shocking nobody who knows me: Smaug. SMAUG SMAUG SMAUG. That was a FREAKING AWESOME DRAGON.
I also mainly came away really wanting to write more Legolas/Gimli! I love seeing so much more of their backstory and context, and also that they made Legolas more of a dick, haha. How little use he has for dwarves originally, and that last fight where he was just so BAFFLED by his nose bleeding, that massive unconscious arrogance - “wait, that orc hurt me???” And, well, I loved that Kili/Tauriel made explicitly canonical the idea that yes, elves and dwarves can get romantically interested in each other.
I did have one issue with Kili/Tauriel, though, namely Kili finding Tauriel physically attractive at first sight. He’s a dwarf! He should be all, yes fine, her beard is just fuzz you can barely see if you look close, and she looks like she might bend in a high wind, but I don’t care, she’s great at killing orcs and she’s got a great personality!
I just really DNW the suggestion that dwarves share our/elven standards of beauty as if those are absolute standards of beauty. But Tolkien is bad at that in general, of course. :/
Now of course I am coming up with this whole theory where the dwarves do share elven ideas of beauty, but they also and even more value permanence and the work of their hands, and to them if someone is too pretty/well-dressed/kempt that implies they aren’t spending that time working.
And of course elves can waste time primping, they live forever and they haven’t got any patience anyway, that’s why they’re always faffing about with their elvishy magic instead of doing things properly. But dwarves don’t have eternity. What are you going to spend your two centuries on, curling your hair and holding out your pinky finger? Of course not, get back to that forge and stop thinking about what you look like.
And so they shake their heads a bit over Kili, who is this odd dwarf out who likes “pretty” and the other dwarves are mostly perplexed why he spends a little too much time trimming his beard and eats a little too neatly.
Anyway, so I can totally go there, but I needed either some more delay or to be sold something like that a little bit more to be happy with his insta-crush.
On Tauriel herself, I really liked the canonical message that yes, there are women warriors among the elves, so her creation was in the plus column for me, even though the romance plot was kind of creaky and not given enough air.
Thorin’s speech in Laketown was a little too modern, and I thought it was clunky to use that scene as the place to deliver exposition about Bard being the descendant of the Lords of Dale. Minor quibble: did they really have to cast an Orlando Bloom lookalike as Bard? It felt like Will from POTC had wandered on to the set. Actually, he and Legolas were never around at the same time, were they? HMMM… :P
I loved the scenes inside Erebor so much, and I actually really liked Laketown, which was a completely new setting (and whoa omg! an actual person of color! gasp! I mean, it’s not much, but at least the movies no longer totally endorse the crappy idea that there are no black people in Middle-Earth, ugh).
I liked Dol Guldur as well, and the flame-figure of Sauron. But, Gandalf, dude, Radaghast is RIGHT when he says “this is not a nice place to meet!”
I also thought they did a really great job of reconciling the use of Ring in a way that worked with the previous movies (where putting on the Ring was clearly a Very Bad Idea) as well as compatible with the way it was used in The Hobbit, as a practical and useful ring of invisibility. The scene with the white spider (?) in Mirkwood, where Bilbo actually deliberately attacked a monster to get back the ring, and the way afterwards he just sits there shaking and holding it and recognizing that he was way too invested in the ring, was really nice - and with no exposition! They trusted us to get it just from Martin Freeman, and he totally delivered.
And it’s always just happymaking to go back to Middle Earth. It’s just so BEAUTIFUL - the landscapes, the visuals. <3
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