The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug for iphone instal

You don’t need to wait for films two or three to start seeing the character relationships and narrative hooks pay off – by the time Gandalf is facing down the Balrog, or Aragorn is choosing to let Frodo go in favor of saving Merry and Pippin, or Sam is risking his life to accompany Frodo on the rest of the journey, the audience’s investment is being rewarded, and it is being rewarded in such a way that when the credits roll, the viewer feels extremely satisfied.īut The Desolation of Smaug does not and cannot effectively operate as its own, fully satisfying experience. The Fellowship of the Ring, while planting the seeds for the entire trilogy, plays host to a contained and emotionally impactful arc. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a major cinematic masterpiece for many reasons, but one of the things that has always impressed me most about the films are that, for all the cumulative impact they create, each chapter works wonderfully as a standalone entity.

The crazy thing is that this is a problem I have only because of the standard Jackson himself set for how to do multi-part film epics. No matter how spectacular the material it presents may be, Smaug is all rising action in search of a meaningful culmination, and by withholding that pay-off from viewers and leaving all our investment unfulfilled, Jackson has severely lessened the potential impact of this individual chapter. With a cliffhanger ending that cuts things off mid-climax, the film is incomplete, a series of extremely tantalizing set-ups that has only the slightest of internal pay-offs, if even that. Taken as a film, however – as the standalone, 161-minute entity that audiences will be watching this weekend – I find The Desolation of Smaug highly problematic, if not downright infuriating.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug for iphone instal