Movie review: Desolation of Smaug
Ah, the Hobbit Part Dos. I liked it. Liked it more than the first one. But beyond that, meh. My boyfriend is really hot to see it again, so I suppose I will, but that's three hours I could be spending some other way. But whatever.
We saw it initially in a high frame rate 3-D/IMAX thing, the only one in Tulsa, I think. I can see what the critics meant by how the movie looks a bit fakey that way. All the live action scenes look ... well, live action. They look like a bunch of guys wearing heavy make-up, wigs and prosthetics, carrying fake weapons and waving them around badly, on a set that's possibly made of cleverly carved styrofoam. When they use CGI elements, those elements look real, which is perverse. The dragon, for example, is stunningly realistic, much more so than the dwarves. Bilbo manages to pull off some realism, though his floppy feet are, well, floppy and unfootlike.
However, none of these are really criticisms. After all, I was perfectly happy with the stop-motion Clash of the Titans, and with zillions of poorly animated cartoons. It's like I said in the book review I published earlier today - it's the story that matters, not all the flash and zazzle poured on after.
Speaking of the story, Desolation of Smaug falls down in two critical ways: 1. There's no cost to the characters. Everyone lives. They're never even seriously threatened. and 2. The fight scenes were too over-the-top to be believable. I know, I know - I'm not bothered by elves and orcs duking it out in a mythical realm, but the way the arrows flew around too perfectly, the precision of the shots, the unlikeliness of so many of them, annoyed the hell out of me. Also, due to #1, there was no reason to have the combat there. There was no tension, no concern, and we'd already established Legolas and Tauriel as badasses, so ...? Seriously, it gave the story nothing to watch them kill a hundred orcs. The fact that the orcs did not run away when they saw their tactics were completely ineffective was bizarre. Robots would show more sense. The most rudely programmed survival routine would have resulted in different behaviors. It was useless overkill that sucked up a long stretch of the film while providing nothing to the story.
But the sight of Smaug and the sound of his voice drove my irritation away. They didn't stint with showing him to us, which was awesome. I sorely wished he'd managed to eat a dwarf or two. I hope this movie has some deaths in it somewhere, eventually! So far the only people who have died were orcs and spiders, both of which are shown as so ridiculously stupid that I can't recognize them as sentient. I'd have more sympathy for lions or hyenas (who would at least have more sense). Lord of the Rings at least killed off a few folks here and there (even if most of them were then miraculously restored).
The funny thing is that a lot of this is right by the book. Tolkien, like Suzanne Collins, was no George Martin. He didn't like to kill off his main characters, or any character the reader might find sympathetic. Nearly everyone of good heart survives and flourishes, and while I like that to a degree, after a while it kills the dramatic tension. Give me a little drama, guys! A little drama and a lot less gorey orc death.
We saw it initially in a high frame rate 3-D/IMAX thing, the only one in Tulsa, I think. I can see what the critics meant by how the movie looks a bit fakey that way. All the live action scenes look ... well, live action. They look like a bunch of guys wearing heavy make-up, wigs and prosthetics, carrying fake weapons and waving them around badly, on a set that's possibly made of cleverly carved styrofoam. When they use CGI elements, those elements look real, which is perverse. The dragon, for example, is stunningly realistic, much more so than the dwarves. Bilbo manages to pull off some realism, though his floppy feet are, well, floppy and unfootlike.
However, none of these are really criticisms. After all, I was perfectly happy with the stop-motion Clash of the Titans, and with zillions of poorly animated cartoons. It's like I said in the book review I published earlier today - it's the story that matters, not all the flash and zazzle poured on after.
Speaking of the story, Desolation of Smaug falls down in two critical ways: 1. There's no cost to the characters. Everyone lives. They're never even seriously threatened. and 2. The fight scenes were too over-the-top to be believable. I know, I know - I'm not bothered by elves and orcs duking it out in a mythical realm, but the way the arrows flew around too perfectly, the precision of the shots, the unlikeliness of so many of them, annoyed the hell out of me. Also, due to #1, there was no reason to have the combat there. There was no tension, no concern, and we'd already established Legolas and Tauriel as badasses, so ...? Seriously, it gave the story nothing to watch them kill a hundred orcs. The fact that the orcs did not run away when they saw their tactics were completely ineffective was bizarre. Robots would show more sense. The most rudely programmed survival routine would have resulted in different behaviors. It was useless overkill that sucked up a long stretch of the film while providing nothing to the story.
But the sight of Smaug and the sound of his voice drove my irritation away. They didn't stint with showing him to us, which was awesome. I sorely wished he'd managed to eat a dwarf or two. I hope this movie has some deaths in it somewhere, eventually! So far the only people who have died were orcs and spiders, both of which are shown as so ridiculously stupid that I can't recognize them as sentient. I'd have more sympathy for lions or hyenas (who would at least have more sense). Lord of the Rings at least killed off a few folks here and there (even if most of them were then miraculously restored).
The funny thing is that a lot of this is right by the book. Tolkien, like Suzanne Collins, was no George Martin. He didn't like to kill off his main characters, or any character the reader might find sympathetic. Nearly everyone of good heart survives and flourishes, and while I like that to a degree, after a while it kills the dramatic tension. Give me a little drama, guys! A little drama and a lot less gorey orc death.