There was a job listing on thebigidea.co.nz a while back. A young dude was looking for someone to do some transcribing for him. He was building a science fiction universe for a possible series of novels. He’d devised around 60 planets – ecosystems, animals, races, conflicts, histories.
It all existed, imagined, but he couldn’t keep track of the content. He needed someone to make it orderly.
Watching the third act of The Desolation of Smaug, that ad came to mind. That reckless obsession with scope at the expense of depth; global politics at the expense of individual characters; the world at the expense of the stories within it.
Neither An Unexpected Journey nor Desolation are really interested in the stories of Bilbo Baggins or Thorin Oakenshield – at least, not for the story’s sake. They’re more interested in building Middle-earth. In other words, they’re more interested in being prequels to The Lord Of The Rings than in being The Hobbit Parts 1 and 2.
It was more obvious in An Unexpected Journey. You could tell when Jackson was world-building because Radagast, Galadriel and Elrond were on screen. The seams are hidden a bit better in Desolation.
Gandalf’s departure to the tombs is a natural segue into LOTR backstory, as opposed to the sudden detour of Unexpected Journey’s Rivendell summit; Legolas and Tauriel weave in and out of both The Hobbit and LOTR stories without dragging their heels too much; Radagast doesn’t command full scenes.
But this is all still here, cluttering up the film and slowing it down considerably. The film outright stops in its tracks once or twice to lay the foundations for LOTR, and we spend far too much time muddling around Mirkwood after Bilbo and the dwarves have left.
And then there’s that third act. Jackson cuts between three different locations in the 45 minute-long finale – Bilbo and the dwarves facing down Smaug in the Lonely Mountain, Gandalf searching for Sauron in some ruins, some orc shit in Laketown.
The showdown in the Lonely Mountain is phenomenal spectacle, frenetic and filled with moving parts and really easy to follow. It rises and falls in the way that great action setpieces should (if it's not clear what I mean, go watch the scene in Jurassic Park where the power goes out and the jeeps stop outside the T-Rex pen). But it keeps getting interrupted by stuff, stuff that's either comparatively low stakes or stuff that leads to a foregone conclusion.
Desolation’s not bad, and part of the reason why is because it’s much better paced than the sluggish Unexpected Journey.
But the rhythm’s still not right. It’s too slow, too awkward, still distracting its audience from the cool fantasy-action film at its heart. And the rhythm suffers because Jackson is so preoccupied with the world of The Lord of the Rings that he’s forgotten about the story he’s telling.
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(Cover image: Warner Brothers)