The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction

The second installment of Peter Jackson's interminable trilogy proves, again, that more is less.

There are two obvious ways a director can go wrong in adapting a work with a large and ardent pre-existing fan base. He (or she) can feel so constrained by expectations that he makes his adaptation too literal, a book-on-film. Or he can get carried away riffing on the original story, pulling in references from related works and assuming that fans appetites for additional material are, for all intents and purposes, insatiable.

Peter Jackson's Violent Betrayal of Tolkien

As a general rule, I think the former temptation, over-fidelity, is the greater hazard. But Peter Jacksons The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is proof that when you go the other wayreally, really far the other waythe result can be genuinely egregious.

Last years The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first installment of Jacksons Hobbit trilogythe very phrase hits me like a wave of depressiontook Tolkiens slender childrens novel and reimagined it as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Characters from the latter work (Galadriel, Saruman, Radagast) were imported for cameos, and the entire production was juiced upover-written, over-orchestrated, over-CGId, over-everythingedto be more epic and grownup.

This time out, Jackson goes further still, producing a film that plays less like LoTR prequel than LoTR remake. The film opens in the town of Bree, where a small-statured traveller stopping at the inn of the Prancing Pony finds himself under watchful, unfriendly gazes until a mysterious figure comes to his aid. (Get it?) This time out, the traveller is Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and the mystery man is Gandalf (Ian McKellan). But the sense of dj vu, however deliberate, is suffocating.

And yes, before we go further, Im well aware that this meeting is cited in The Hobbit, and that many of Jacksons other additions and digressions are part of the larger Middle Earth canon. But despite the fact the Tolkien went back to amend The Hobbit more than once, he never chose to cram in all this supplemental material, because the book was not intended as a sweeping, multifaceted epic, but rather as a more personal, hobbits-eye-view adventure story.

Not so, alas, in the hands of Jackson, who is so titillated by his various subplots and foreshadowings that he even loses track of his protagonist, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), for considerable stretches. Orcswhich played no role at all in Tolkiens novelplay an even larger role in this installment than in the previous one, the better to supply the many impalements and beheadings Jackson feels compelled to display. Forget cameos by LoTR veterans: In this film, Legolas (likewise never mentioned in the book) reappears as a principal character. (Its hard to shake the suspicion that Orlando Blooms asking price must have come down considerably from its inflated, post-LoTR high.) And the identity of the mysterious necromancer who has begun forming his armies of darkness, fiercely implied in the first movie, is made all too painfully explicit by the midpoint of this one.

A brand-new character is thrown into the mix in the form of a woodland elf named Tauriel (played by Evangeline Lilly, or Kate from Lost), who quickly becomes the crux of an interspecies love triangle. And Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) has been semi-demoted to Bard the Bargeman (the movie spends a lot of time in Laketown), though theres little doubt that hell be given the chance to earn his loftier nickname using a newfangled Dwarvish anti-aircraft crossbow in the trilogys next installment.

Yes, next installment. Though Bilbo and the dwarves do make it at last to the Lonely Mountain to encounter the dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), the great worm will have to wait until the final movie to intersect with his arrow of destiny. Instead, he spends the latter part of this film contending with a borderline MacGyveresque plot by the dwarves to bring about his destruction deep in the halls of Erebor. (I hope Im beyond the point where I need to note that this, too, is a Jackson invention.)

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The Hobbit 2 Is Bad Fan Fiction