Opinion of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

[tik 🪀✨]

A repulsive, bloated cash-grab that I will not be viewing.

Isn't "repulsive, bloated cash grab" pretty much most mainstream entertainment? As though that means the characters, storyline, cinematography, etc are just now cancelled out. Huh.

I enjoyed it endlessly more than the first movie. I came in with very low expectations and found surprisingly little to complain about. Of course there were some scenes I was.. not taken with, at all, and found them jarring and that they killed my tenuous suspension of disbelief. Overall, though, it was quite entertaining, though the end was frustrating.

[tik 🪀✨]

Believe me, they do take a backseat. They're still there a little, of course - it is supposed to be story for youngs. There is still a little bit of ridiculous, but the storylines are developing and the whole thing is much darker. I will tell you that he's taken some serious liberties with the book. If I were younger and cared more about the integrity of the story, I might have hated it. Not sure. That's not as important to me now. Instead, I enjoyed seeing it fleshed out.

So no, no wacky hijinks and silly songs. But, as much as I love the man, Stephen Fry threw me right off. If you're creating a fantasy world, avoid well known actors ffs.

[tik 🪀✨]

Believe me, they do take a backseat. They're still there a little, of course - it is supposed to be story for youngs.

The issue of course being that the specific sort of youngs for whom The Hobbit was written are the not the same sort for whom these movies are being made.

As someone who had a brief stint attempting to learn Quenya in high school, I can understand that. I'm much more lax about it now. I make an attempt to judge entertainment with an open mind. I'll relent that I likely would have joined the angry mob when the purity of the adaptation was so sullied in my dorkier days. But you don't spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create three excessively long movies that will please no one but people who have made it through the Silmarillion.