The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, MGM, WingNut Films, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I screened the second in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of movies based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (thereby unwittingly fulfilling Erich von Stroheim’s dream of making a nine-hour movie out of a normal-sized novel), called The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Smaug (whose last name’s vowels are pronounced “ow,“ not “aw” as I had assumed) was a dragon who invaded the mountain kingdom of Erebor where a king who started out benevolent but turned mean out of greed turned his subjects into slave laborers and had them amass a huge treasure of gold – only Smaug decided to grab the treasure for himself, literally burned the dwarves who were Erebor’s indigenous population out of their cave dwellings and ruled there alone. The basic story of The Hobbit is the effort of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage, a potentially powerful actor somewhat wasted here – he’s essentially playing a Game of Thrones-type of character, only this is Game of Thrones Lite) to take back his kingdom with a band of 13 unlikely recruits, including the unlikeliest recruit of all, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a hobbit who’s pulled out of his comfortable life in the Shire, Middle-Earth to join the dangerous quest.

I didn’t care for the first film in the sequence, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and I liked this one even less. I nodded off a lot during it and even when I was awake I was not particularly impressed with what I was seeing – especially since Ian McKellen’s character of Gandalf takes a powder through much of the action and therefore the one actor who played with power and authority in the first Hobbit movie is missing from this one. The coolest sequence in the movie is one in which the questers have to cross through an enchanted wood in order to get to the mountain kingdom via a path that keeps disappearing on them and forcing them to find it again. Here it seemed to me that Tolkien was ripping off The Wizard of Oz as well as the Nibelungenlied and the Wagner Ring of the Nibelung based on it – though Charles, acting once again as my “Tolkien Whisperer,” said that sequence wasn’t in the book and that some of the material used in the movie came not from The Hobbit but from its prequel, The Silmarillion, a piece of Tolkieniana cobbled together by his son Christopher after dad’s death from the writings Tolkien had done just to set forth his backstory and keep it all straight. (One thing I admire about Tolkien is his determination, once he set the basic rules of his universe, to stick by them and not indulge in the habit of many other fantasy writers of having anything happen just because they could.)

For some reason the plot required Bilbo to sneak into the mountain redoubt of Smaug and steal a priceless jewel that Thorin needs to establish his authority over the kingdom – and Smaug turns out to be the most annoyingly talkative dragon of all time. Wagner’s Fafner, similarly ruling over a golden treasure inside a mountain which he’d acquired from an avaricious dwarf king who had forced his subjects to accumulate it for him, at least was succinct and to the point – about all he said to Siegfried when Siegfried came by to kill him was, “I have and I hold; let me sleep” – whereas Smaug droned on and on and on, so often telling Bilbo he was going to kill him I found myself wishing he’d just do it already – much the way Charles joked about the James Bond villains and how they should kill him immediately once they capture him instead of working out some insanely complicated means of killing him that will only give him time to escape. I was also puzzled by the reference in the dialogue to “seven armies” that will conquer wherever-it-is when the last episode is called The Battle of the Five Armies (what happened to the other two armies? Did they get slaughtered? Did they join the other side? Did they storm the Capitol to insist that Sauron continue to rule even after he’d lost his re-election bid?).

Mostly The Desolation of Smaug was pretty slow going despite the sheer beauty of the New Zealand scenery standing in for Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (less beautiful than in the first episode because much more of this one takes place in cramped interior spaces) and I really wasn’t entertained by it – and as I said about episode one, I think after seeing Game of Thrones (where for all the sordidness and the emphasis on the nastier aspects of humanity, the characters seemed more believable and even multidimensional) I like The Hobbit movies even less than I would have if I’d seen them first. I was particularly perturbed by the ending – or, rather, the non-ending, since I had assumed Smaug would be dispatched at the end of the film and instead it stopped with as blatant a cliff-hanger as a Republic serial, with that annoyingly loquacious dragon still alive. Incidentally, not only did Stephen Colbert have a bit part as one of the bad guys’ spies in The Desolation of Smaug, on last night’s show he came up with a whole bunch of Tolkienish gibberish which made me ask Charles whether that was genuinely from Tolkien or Colbert was just making it up – and he wasn’t sure either!