Wow, did we watch the same film? I though DoS was terrible, far worse than the first film. It started off well, with some fun, charming elements like the bees, but once they left Beorn's house it started to go down...I would say really fast, but it was a long, drawn-out, tedious pace.
Most of mirkwood was awful, draining the soul and cheer that were Tolkiens elves, even in the midst of the creeping darkness, replacing it with depressing, moping, blonde-haired emos. The barrel-ride, which should have been a fun escape, was a slow-dragged, out, ridiculous cgi-fest with no purpose that I can make out, except for filling time and fluffing the entirely unnecessary time wasting romance between Made-Up Female Plot Device A and Killi cos...reasons.
Superhero legolas comes to the rescue, of course, fighting orcs that had absolutely no reason to be there served no purpose at all than filling time and continue to drag out the film needlesdsley right through to lake town, where they continued doing exactly the same thing, for still no apparent reason. It doesn't forward the quest in any way, isn't part of the books, doesn't create a backstory for anything at all important to the overall story, serving only, as far as I can tell, to fill time. Padding for some witless, cheesy love-triangle that isn't needed and does nothing to further the plot.
Padding out Bard a bit I could kind of understand, even though it's entirely unnecessary, but inventing and dragging out through attrocious dialogue, his family and local politics, was just massively overdone. I really disliked all of the Lake town scenes, which is a shame because Stephen Fry. Superhero elves and plate-throwing, screeching children, just is not my idea of fun. Not to mention that most of the set and costumes looked more like something out of Discworld, breaking the immersion of the film's own style and parodying, rather than utilising, the jollity of the book. Forcing Bard into a lone hero/robin hood type character, just felt so forced and required even more, terribly written, exposition. More time is filled here with people trying to sling him in prison cos more reasons.
Then we get to the Lonely Mountain and Smaug. Bilbo's encnounter with the dragon started out better than the previous scenes, probably because they were back to using actual source material rather than turning one or two lines into thirty minute scenes or just out-right making shit up, but quite why jackson felt the need to rip off Alien 3, lifting almost scene for scene the entire last 20 minutes of the film, and sticking into the Hobbit, I really don't know.
Seriously, luring the beast into the forge, by splitting into groups, and luring it down specific paths, using one of the cast as bait, dropping molten metal on the creature, still of the lake of liquid metal settling, beast leaps out of the forge hissing, burning and steaming..it's all there. The only thing missing scene was bilbo leaping in to kill the thing bursting out his chest.
All this so that an angry Smaug flies off to Lake Town, which he did in the book anyway, as a result of working out from Bilbo's riddles, that the quest had help from the people there. The entire thing could have been cut, the film would have lost nothing and infact, would have been better off for it since the end result of the entire fight was no different than if it had not occurred. It was nothing more than relly bad filler material, stolen entirely from another film, for no reason. What was Jackson thinking? "Well we've used some book lines, made some references to my films, and invented who hosts of stuff, what's left? Oh, how about we just copy stuff from a different film? I know Alien 3, that's kinda like a children's fantasy book, right?"
The fact that it was entirely done in really terrible CGI, I can only assume was further "homage" to Alien 3. I just don't see why any of it was necessary? Did they need to paint Smaug s some kind of uber-badass? No! He's a fucking dragon, just having him fly off to burn Lake Town to teach them a lesson is enough. A huge dragon flying off to burn people because they might have helped some guy steal his stuff, says on it's own, this dragon is one uber-badass.
As the credits rolled, I was just relieved. Even my partner, who kind of liked it, said that it was too long and dragged out. To me, if you think a film was too long, that's not a good film. It's a poor film, with some fun bits, occasionally. It felt longer than the first film, felt longer than any of the installments of LoTR yet as far as I can tell, it was actually shorter by about 20 minutes.
I really don't recognise anything of the film I saw, in this review. Maybe I just have rose-tinted glasses for the first film, but I though its pace made much more sense. The additional material made sense in context of the previous films and the book and it felt like the beginning of an journey.
This second film, lost any sense of journey, all sense of wonder and any real direction, once the party left Beorn's house. It was just a string of endless action sequences, none of which had any real purpose and were entirely made up by Jackson, while the scenery and journey were almost completely forgotten about. Little more than blurrs in the background, as fight lead to fight, lead to chase, lead to fight. We saw almost nothing of Mirkwood, barely anything of the Elven-king's halls and the less said about Erebor, the better. The journey between these places was lost entirely. Any time that wasn't spent fighting/chasing, was dark, dreary, dull and pointless.
I really did not like this film.