The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Extended Edition

Three hours and six minutes long, when viewed in this expanded edit, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is, given the length, very obviously not an honest-to-goodness attempt to simply adapt the middle section of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Instead the film is more of an expensive retrofit that presumes to batter this material into a shape that better connects with writer-director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In expanding Tolkien's text Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro have transformed a comparatively slight children's book into hours upon hours of impersonal incident. Packed with interchangeable dwarves and possessed of a digressive structure Desolation of Smaug meanders, a piece that consistently finds itself in desperate need of a unifying perspective on the constant, plastic noise. 

That isn't to say that there aren't stretches of the film that entertain though. Desolation of Smaug absolutely explodes into life about 40 minutes in when the camera settles on Martin Freeman's pleasantly understated Bilbo Baggins for some prolonged capering. Trapped in a murky forest and surrounded by pungent swamps and creeping spiders, the young halfling takes the initiative, briefly behaving as if this were actually his story. He climbs knotted branches to get a gasp of fresh air, as well as a sense of where exactly they need to go next, then battles with various layers of screeching arachnids. An albino creature that lives beneath a trap door and aims clawed appendage at a temporarily dropped One Ring even looks like something out of Jackson's previous epic, King Kong. A welcome sort of oozing nightmare then. Sir Ian McKellen's Gandalf the Grey, who is now on an entirely separate adventure, also gets to explore a variety of expertly ruined environments - from a disturbed tomb that was carved into a mountainside thousands of years ago to a castle packed with staircases that lead off in every conceivable direction. 

Perhaps it's because both sequences are built around singular characters with clear moment-to-moment objectives rather than an undulating mob on a mystic (and therefore disinteresting) quest? It helps as well that Jackson is well versed in the language of horror filmmaking. Pitch black shadows and canted angles on vulnerable human progress through oppressively baroque environments are much more in the director's wheelhouse, especially when compared to a grossly distended rollercoaster sequence in which a dozen casked dwarves thrash along river rapids. It's an interlude that registers as elastic and artificial, no matter how much incongruent, pixelated GoPro footage Jackson squeezes in amongst the cartoon rollicking. Issued at the tail end of the post-Avatar craze for 3D filmmaking, Desolation of Smaug is similarly dependent on green screen sets and the hapless actors they ensnare but not so fluent in how it resolves the relationship between these individual elements. Frequently there's a sense that the film's weightless action would be better served by a total submission to animation. If, for instance, Desolation of Smaug was stylised and cel animated then the obvious artifice of bodies completely unencumbered by physics might then read as charming or, at least, gesturally pleasant. Here they are instead a persistent and hammering reminder that you're watching a confused retread of grander films.