Before going forward, an important spoiler warning: this article assumes that you've seen both The Hobbit films and read the book and takes no pains to avoid spoilers for any of it. As such, it will spoil not just the movie and the book, but probably also many elements of the next Hobbit film. If you haven't read the books and want to be surprised by the next movie, do not pass beyond this point.

Let me begin by saying that I didn't dislike The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

This was emphatically not the case with last year's An Unexpected Journey, which has a whole pile of structural and thematic problems. Peter Jackson and crew took what could have been a reasonably watchable two-hour fantasy film and padded it out to three hours with interminable chase sequences, memorable-for-all-the-wrong-reasons rock monster battles, and pointless Elijah Wood cameos.

The new movie inherits a few of these problems. There are still more than a few chases, and the scenes that aren't chases are often overly talky sequences where ominous figures drone on ominously about an ominously ominous Coming Evil. Most of this is done to set up the third movie, which will wrap up the story of The Hobbit but also bridge the gap between these prequel movies and the Lord of the Rings films. These ponderous speeches and jumps away from the main action still drag Desolation down, but the storyline is more straightforward (and, at a mere two hours and 40 minutes, moves more briskly) than the previous film.

Last year we took a wide-ranging look at many aspects of An Unexpected Journey, but this year let's focus on one aspect of the new movie that has some of the Tolkien faithful up in arms: it changes the story. It changes it kind of a lot. And these changes run deeper than the ones made to expand material from Tolkien's other writing and shoehorn Sauron (a present-but-unnamed and largely backgrounded figure in the book) into the main action.

The Two Towers, and the bad kind of change

The movie's many changes have been compared to the biggest and most egregious change in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (if you don't count the absence of "The Scouring of the Shire"): Faramir's behavior in The Two Towers. In both the book and the film, Boromir's brother Faramir is presented with the opportunity to capture Frodo and take the Ring from him by force. Book-Faramir chooses to help Frodo along in his quest and give up the Ring, an action that drives home for the reader the fact that Faramir is in many ways wiser and better suited for leadership than his brother Boromir (who failed the same test). Movie-Faramir is so desperate for his father's approval that he captures Frodo and Sam and tries to bring them back to Gondor, letting them go only after a close shave with a Ringwraith.



It was a change made because the Two Towers film ended earlier in the timeline of events than the Two Towers book and because Faramir's brief internal struggle probably wouldn't have thrilled a mainstream audience as much as an Orc battle and Ringwraith encounter. But it changed Faramir for the worse—it took one of the book's better characters and more important character moments (seriously, being able to reject or let go of the Ring of one's own volition is a big deal) and tossed it out because it wouldn't have looked cool.

The Desolation of Smaug makes changes and additions as large and larger than these, and unlike the first Hobbit film, the events of the second one depart from the book significantly. Still, I'm more inclined to defend changes to The Hobbit's story because The Hobbit's story is less complex and less satisfying than The Lord of the Rings'. Too much happens by chance or by accident. Too many characters are left undeveloped. To make a story that's satisfying to adults and not just children, you've got to give the source material some help.

Desolation of Smaug, and recognizing when change is necessary

An Unexpected Journey was pretty faithful to Tolkien's source material, which meant that it imported some of The Hobbit's less-plausible turns of events. The most noticeable of these are the story's many dei ex machina, the times when Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves are saved from certain doom through coincidence and luck rather than their own skill and resourcefulness. Any time an eagle has to fly in from nowhere to save the day, you should realize you've written yourself into a corner.

These kinds of narrative turns are just fine for a children's story, because kids usually don't have the critical faculties necessary to recognize an implausible rescue when they see one. In a movie made for a more general audience, the use of too many coincidences quickly begins to feel cheap and lazy. This is all to reiterate that The Hobbit is a simpler story than The Lord of the Rings—events and characters are mostly too simple to carry a series of major motion pictures all by themselves. The Desolation of Smaug recognizes this, and rather than portraying the events of The Hobbit exactly as they happen, it uses the book as a blueprint and builds on top of it.

The elves of Mirkwood, for example, are a pretty minor element of the book. Thranduil (the king) is present, but he has no particular quarrel with Thorin (the dwarves are imprisoned chiefly because they were trespassing and won't tell him why). His son Legolas, a major character in Lord of the Rings, is absent and goes unmentioned (if Tolkien had even invented him at this point). The movie greatly expands both of these characters, mostly to serve the third film and to tie the Hobbit movies more closely to the Lord of the Rings movies—Thranduil is more than a little unhinged compared to the serene, unflappable elves we're used to, and Orlando Bloom's Legolas is of course given many, many opportunities to jump and slide around killing Orcs.

The change that the Tolkien faithful might find more offensive is the introduction of Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly of Lost fame), an entirely new character and, frankly, a welcome female face in a fictional universe that revolves around its men (she's no Éowyn, but she'll do). She's a useful character for a couple of reasons: for one, she works to encourage the isolationist Thranduil and Legolas to take an interest in the affairs of the world around them, adding some necessary texture and conflict to the usually blandly harmonious elves. Second, she serves as an unexpected possible love interest to one of the dwarves (Kili). The book and the movie both have trouble making the dwarves characters beyond the odd quirk or physical characteristic, so anything that can separate one of them from the pack makes it that much easier to actually get invested in what happens onscreen.

The other major character change involved Bard, an archer from Lake-Town who (spoiler alert) ends up slaying the dragon and becoming king of the rebuilt town of Dale. Bard appears pretty late in The Hobbit and is introduced mere pages before killing Smaug with advice gleaned from a magic bird. A previously unseen character killing your movie's primary antagonist is another one of those unearned deus ex machina moments we talked about before, and the movie wisely introduces him earlier and expands his role. It's made more explicit and important that Bard is descended from the former kings of Dale, and that (rather than a talking thrush) is how he knows about the dragon's weak point. We get a better idea of what makes the character tick, and we spend some time with family. All of this stuff fleshes out his character and, again, makes the audience care about what happens to him.

The last change to note is the dwarves' encounter with Smaug, which doesn't happen in the book at all. It's a bit surprising, actually—you spend the entire book following Bilbo and the dwarves to the Lonely Mountain to confront the dragon, and in the end the only one of them who actually interacts with Smaug in any meaningful way is Bilbo, not the dwarves whose homes and heirlooms were stolen away by the dragon in the first place.

No, Bilbo and some of the dwarves (a small contingent is left behind in Lake-Town to help movie-Kili with his movie-injury) go face-to-face with Smaug and come out alive on the other end. This is, to say it lightly, completely implausible. Our Heroes only survive because the movie ignores how fire works and because Smaug gets to monologuing like nobody's business. The dragon has every opportunity to fry Bilbo and the dwarves over and over again and thus leaves them alone only because he assumes that watching Lake-Town burn will be more painful for them than actually dying themselves. If you say so, Smaug.

The dragon encounter stretches plausibility and goes on for too long, but even so it's a necessary change. In the book, Smaug speaks with Bilbo briefly and flies away to exact his revenge on Lake-Town shortly after, leaving the hobbit and the dwarves to sit in the dark for days and wonder what happened. That doesn't exactly make for Oscar-worthy cinema.

Having the dwarves encounter the dragon and come out alive (using mostly their own skills and ingenuity, mind you, and not relying only on luck and coincidence) is important. It drives home that, hey, the dwarves actually are clever and competent fighters and not just funny old men who constantly get tied up by trolls and giant spiders (this will be important for the next film, which looks to be battle-heavy). It makes Smaug that much more threatening an opponent, because despite his visible weak point, he can't be stopped even by the dwarves' best efforts. It's all about taking things from the book and adding real weight to them, rather than the manufactured weight you can give something by making everyone speak slowly and gravely all the time.

There's too much new stuff to go over here, of course, and not all of it is great—this movie suffers from orc-overload just as the first one did, and the time spent following Gandalf on his mostly solo side-adventure might pay off in the third movie but is too often tedious and distracting here (and the same goes for many of the Legolas set-pieces). Martin Freeman is a treasure and does mostly great work here, but too frequently he's pushed into the background to give the often unlikeable Thorin, or another character, the spotlight. A judicious editor could probably have left another 15 or 20 minutes of material on the cutting room floor without adversely affecting the story.

Still, overall, Desolation is a marked and welcome improvement over the first film. There were fewer over-broad and tonally inconsistent attempts at comedy (the lighter humor used in Desolation lands a good percentage of the time), and Benedict Cumberbatch's Smaug was a high point in the same way that Andy Serkis' Gollum was a high point in the first movie. The movie sticks its cliffhanger ending magnificently—most of the audience in the theater we were in groaned audibly, not in disgust but in despair at having to wait another year to see what happens. If the third movie can manage to be this entertaining, the Hobbit films may prove themselves to be worthy predecessor-successors to the Lord of the Rings trilogy after all.

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