All There, No Back Again
We should've been here a whole movie ago. That's what I kept thinking, couldn't stop thinking, all the way through The Desolation of Smaug: It was taking entirely too long to get to the dragon. But first it took us too long to get to the giant spiders. These two set pieces, plus the troll scene, are what people remember from the novel, and what they were looking for when they came to see Peter Jackson's version. Here are some things we weren't looking for: Smaug chasing the dwarves all over the mine, shooting flame every minute or so. After waiting so long to see the dragon, now I was growing impatient for him to leave--except when he did, it was to set up the cliff hanger for the third movie. Earlier on, the spiders seemed almost an inconvenience, a trick for introducing us to a superfluous scene involving Legolas, the heroic elf who never appeared in the novel at all. And that's how it was for the entire nearly three hours of this film: wai...