Hobbit Pt 2 - Desolation of Smaug

[demoneyes]

Short version - If you enjoyed the first part and found the joys of returning to Middle Earth and the exquisite design and rendering of Tolkein's world outweighed your annoyance at the liberties taken with plot and characters, and the bloating out to three films then the same should be true for this one.  Or should it alas have been the other way

Comments

[hrrunka]

On balance I'd rather have seen the 2D version, but most of the time the 3D wasn't too distracting. However, having twice as many optical surfaces between my eyes and the screen did get a bit tedious.

The giant statue was one of those "Yeah. Right..." eye-rolling moments.

[thnidu]

By my count there were three moments when this film broke my disbelief to actively annoy me. One right at the beginning - Thorin and Gandalf in the pub [this saddened me - Tolkein's entire point was that the events of the Hobbit and the subsequent salvation of the North in the War of the Ring *did* arise from a chance meeting, so to have Thorin say "This was no chance meeting" is not just to miss and destroy that point but to do so knowingly and deliberately]- ”
Tolkien's point was nothing of the kind. Read Appendix A, near the end (pp. III.359-360 in the Houghton Mifflin 2nd edition hardcover): On a time Thorin, returning west from a journey, stayed at Bree for the night. There Gandalf was also.
[...]The Dragon Sauron might use with terrible effect. How then could the end of Smaug be achieved

[demoneyes]

Yes, that is the exact passage (bar that it's not Thorin's fall he was grieving about). But what Thorin is saying in the film (it seemed to me) is that the meeting has been engineered by Gandalf and what Tolkein said is that the meeting, however desired by both parties, occurred seemingly by chance.

The interaction of chance and fate is a continuing theme through LotR. My reading of the text is that what Gandalf is saying is that whilst their meeting seemed like chance, it was actually Fate that arranged for it to happen given all that later flowed from that encounter. Which idea is utterly destroyed by the insinuation that Gandalf had arranged to "accidentally" meet Thorin in the pub.