The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
Directed by Peter Jackson
The Dwarves, Bilbo and Gandalf have successfully escaped the Misty Mountains, and Bilbo has gained the One Ring. They all continue their journey to get their gold back from the Dragon, Smaug.
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What critics say influenced The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
If the first Hobbit felt a lot like Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits , this one feels perhaps more like Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys , albeit with more slapstick and other physical humor akin to Brazil .
The dwarves remain a squabbling, loudmouthed, ridiculous bunch, distinguished from each other largely by their silly hats and sillier facial hair, and not much more competent or distinguished than the band of little people in Time Bandits .
If the first Hobbit felt a lot like Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits , this one feels perhaps more like Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys , albeit with more slapstick and other physical humor akin to Brazil .
In that respect, Jackson would seem to be following in the footsteps of George Lucas, whose Star Wars prequel trilogy laboriously re-laid the groundwork for Episodes IV-VI, providing exposition for even the least essential detail (like who built C-3PO) of the future/past films.
In a way that An Unexpected Journey never quite managed, these attempts to turn The Hobbit into a Star Wars-style prequel to the Lord Of The Rings movies never feel forced – there’s a wonderful moment in Mirkwood where we see the Ring starting to exert its power on Bilbo, but the sense of doom always feels like something to be dealt with later.
He even gets Gandalf to play Middle Earth detective, the same tactic George Lucas used to occupy Obi-Wan Kenobi in Episode II of the Star Wars prequels.
Jackson is filming J.R.R. Tolkien's book at a rate of two to three minutes per page (on pace with Erich von Stroheim's long-lost eight-hour cut of Greed), and here he pads the running time by tying this prequel's storyline into his own Lord of the Rings films.
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If the first Hobbit felt a lot like Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits , this one feels perhaps more like Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys , albeit with more slapstick and other physical humor akin to Brazil .
It was once said of director Oliver Stone that he was much like Lennie from "Of Mice and Men" — that he could take any good idea and smother it to death just as John Steinbeck's tragic figure does to mice and lonely women who are desperate to be heard.
Like George Lucas, with “The Phantom Menace,” he is constructing a six-film saga in peculiar order.
(This may, of course, be a case of Attack of the Clones Syndrome: The Phantom Menace was so awful, anything better then cinematic effluent would seem tolerable.)
The usually bland Orlando Bloom (2007's " Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ") reprises his role as Legolas?and may have even gained a hint of a personality in the ten-year interim since 2003's " The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King "?but, as another add-on that wasn't in the novel, his participation feels like a flimsy excuse to shoehorn familiar faces into the proceedings.
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With only that brief glimpse, we suddenly realize that he is literally everywhere, similar to that horrifying moment in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) when the gun-toting survivors discover that the encroaching aliens are already in the room with them, crawling above their heads inside the ceiling panels.
Seeing Smaug reminded me of seeing the T-Rex in Jurassic Park for the first time.