Peter Galen Massey

The only element of any real interest in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the question “What went wrong?” and even that is a pretty dull question because the answer is clear enough: the money people wrapped their fingers around the neck of this movie and strangled it to death.

By saying this, I am not trying to absolve Jackson of his responsibility. He signed the contract, cashed the check, and put his name on the film.

But Jackson was faced with formidable challenges in making Smaug. The biggest challenge was how to manage the legacy brand that he had created through Lord of the Rings, in which the safest route to profit was to deliver basically the same goods in basically the same package, even if those goods had grown a bit stale (ie, the preferred approach of the money people).

Jackson also had to keep his eye on the huge non-English-speaking and/or non-Western audiences for The Desolation of Smaug, since spectacle translates more easily than dialogue, and since special effects are less likely to cause cultural offense than stories or characters.

Jackson decided (or was asked) to pad out a book that would have potentially made one good film into three movies, with a total running time pushing eight hours. And while we’re at it, let’s note Smaug is the middle of the three films, with no natural beginning or end to help give shape to the story.

But with all that said, I’m surprised by how badly Jackson flubbed Smaug considering how well he managed the earlier Lord of the Rings films, in which he balanced character with action, drove the story through both internal and external conflicts, and gave shape to the overall plot.

The Desolation of Smaug is a plodding, tedious, frantic mess. I think the main culprit is the decision to expand the book’s story rather than edit it down. All the padding – particularly filming events that occur off the page in the book – destroys whatever dynamic tension the story arc in the Desolation of Smaug might have achieved and gives us a jumbled collection of scenes instead.

These scenes are not driven by situation, since the situations in Smaug are so many and so various that the connections among them quickly become lost; and these scenes are certainly not driven by character or emotion, which means the talents of at least two very good actors – Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Ian McKellan as Gandalf – go entirely to waste, with what moments of real human feeling they sometimes find soon swept away in the general noise and hubbub.

The result is a whole-movie version of what happens when actors find themselves stuck in a play that really doesn’t work. They fall back on acting bigger, louder, faster to cover up a lack of sense.

In the case of Smaug, this bigger-louder-faster extends to the action sequences and special effects, which are fine as far as they go, but they turn the film into just a roller-coaster ride: viscerally thrilling at times but empty of meaning.

I don’t have a problem with entertainment being entertainment, and businesses working to cash in big by selling to big audiences, but films don’t have to be as desultory as The Hobbit is to earn money for their investors. Joss Whedon’s The Avengers demonstrated that last year. Peter Jackson proved it with his Lord of the Rings movies. Entertainment can excel as high craft, without aspiring to or needing to achieve the goals of art. Craft is a worthy goal. Unfortunately, Smaug isn’t craft. It’s crap.