The Screen Junkies have a new Honest Trailer out, this time for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. With the final instalment in cinemas, we are reminded of the major problems with Peter Jackson’s latest foray into Middle-earth.
Have you seen The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies yet? Did you love it?
If you did, that’s great! Big battle sequences, epic Legolas stunts, and emotional character deaths assaulted our senses for a good two and a half hours, and as the credits rolled, Billy Boyd’s haunting “The Last Goodbye” played us out.
If you didn’t love it as much as you were hoping to, perhaps your issues with Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy are expressed by Screen Junkies in their Honest Trailer for The Desolation of Smaug:
The Honest Trailers are always spot on (albeit in an excessively snarky way), but this one is particularly poignant.
As we leave Middle-earth behind for what is probably the last time, we are left with an odd sense of emptiness: as the Screen Junkies point out, The Hobbit trilogy simply lacked the magic of the original Lord of the Rings films.
Beautiful New Zealand scenery and elaborate set pieces were largely replaced with CGI-constructed green screens, the lengthy adventure felt a bit aimless, few of the main characters actually went through any proper character development, and some of the actors’ hearts just didn’t seem to be in it.
Everything felt and looked less real, and the strength of Peter Jackson’s original The Lord of the Rings trilogy was exactly how real the world seemed. You weren’t watching grown actors play a make-believe game of Elves and Orcs, you were watching actual, realised characters exist in an actual, realised world.
Whatever you think about The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (and Desolation of Smaug, as pointed out above), it did not feel as real. And that’s a shame, because it is obvious that Peter Jackson and his team care a great deal about J.R.R. Tolkien’s life work.
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.