instal the new The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Maybe the biggest achievement of the Rings movies was that (except maybe for the first one) you were never conscious that you were watching a three ( three!)-hour movie.ĭesolation, for better or worse, is somewhere between the Rings films and An Unexpected Journey it's an incremental improvement, but still leans more towards the Hobbit 1 side of things than the other.ĭesolation picks up right where An Unexpected Journey left off-Bilbo (the pitch-perfect Martin Freeman) and his company of dwarves, led by heir to the dwarven throne Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), are headed towards Erebor-the sub-mountainous home that the dwarves used to call home.

I don't think anyone expected this movie to be taut, a quality the Lord of the Rings movies had in spades.

On the one hand, audiences were excited to see it because of course we want more Hobbit we were, frankly, willing to take whatever small taste of Middle Earth we could get, whether or not it was as good as the first three times around.īut, on the other, the failures of An Unexpected Journey made people's guesses about how good Desolation would be to dip sharply. Fans of Lord of the Rings who disliked The Hobbit weren't angry that director Peter Jackson was failing to deliver on 'the potential he'd shown earlier'-the Lord of the Rings films had delivered that potential.Īll of this meant that expectations for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (which I'm calling Desolation for the rest of this review, both for length reasons and because it sounds cool) were, at best, confused. Which makes it so much weirder that An Unexpected Journey was made almost 11 years after the first Lord of the Rings movie was released.

Martin Freeman in 'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug'

Instal the new The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug