Compared with "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey", this one is even darker and hideous. It has to pave the way for the darkness that is about to fall on the Lonely Mountain and even the entire Middle-earth world. There is no doubt that the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy has reached the pinnacle of fantasy movies. It has a high degree of completion and completeness. It is a majestic and tragic epic. I can only admire and marvel in front of it. As its prequel, "The Hobbit" was originally a fireside book for children in Tolkien's pen. As the name suggests, this is just an adventure where the Hobbit goes out of the Shire to explore the unknown world, although in the end there are also The grand scene of the "Battle of the Five Armies" is far from the darkness and cruelty of "Lord of the Rings". The crew adapted this story to make it more "epic", or more "Lord of the Rings".
Is this adaptation successful? I thought it was flawed but it was successful overall. In fact, if such a commercial production is really filmed according to the original work, the audience may not buy it. Doing so will also bring an advantage-to make the styles of "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings" as consistent as possible. It may be difficult for us to adapt to Middle-earth's jump between children's literature and serious literature.
However, limited to the original positioning, length and content of the original work, it inevitably encountered several problems.
The first is the question of rhythm. "The Lord of the Rings" has three original works, and three films were made; "The Hobbit" is only one original book, and three films were also filmed. This creates a feeling of lengthy rhythm-at least for non-fan audiences-which became more pronounced in the first hour of the first part. "The Battle of Smaug" doesn't need to explain the reason for the road. It was on the road from the beginning, and the rhythm has been much faster. However, I have rarely seen dragons that speak human language. It is the first time I have seen dragons with so many words like Smaug, the last dragon in the Middle-earth created by Morgoth. The setting of such talk slowed down the rhythm after entering Gushan.
The second is the question of structure. This is the biggest problem of this film. "Unexpected Journey" is at least a complete movie. It has a clearly distinguishable beginning, development and climax, while "The Battle of Smaug" simply lacks an obvious climax. The reason why the film party did this is obviously from the market's consideration, to raise the audience's expectations for the third part. However, since "The Battle of Smaug" is an independent chapter, its narrative chain should be complete, and the audience's mood of watching the movie should also be respected, and should not become a long trailer of "Going and Returning". From this perspective, the movie is as embarrassing as the dragon.
There is also the issue of the balance between "fun" and "dark". As mentioned above, if "Unexpected Journey" is Shire's beautiful countryside, then "Battle of Smaug" is a dark forest with no sky, but the main creator obviously also took this into consideration. The passage of the dwarves rushing through the barrel is the screenwriter’s original and the most interesting passage in the film. It is hard for us to imagine that such a relaxed and lively action scene would happen in a setting like "Lord of the Rings". But the problem is that there are not too many such paragraphs, but too few.
Finally, there is the issue of character image. I have to admit that the 13 dwarves are extremely difficult to shape, and they really should be distinguished from the primary and secondary. But the first and second parts add up to a total of more than 5 hours. I still only remember Thorin Oakshield as the leader, Bahrain as the wise elder, and the secret love for the wizard Tauriel. The rest is The dwarf is still blurred.
Having said that, I hope you don't think "The Battle of Smaug" is a bad movie. This film is full of imagination and weight, and the introduction of the contents of the appendix of "Lord of the Rings" into the text is also commendable. Personally, just sitting in the theater and listening to Howard Shore's original soundtrack and watching a group of people walking through the magnificent scenery of New Zealand is enough to make my scalp numb.
It’s worth looking forward to. The three climaxes of the killing of Smaug, the attack on Dol Guldur by the Saint White Conference and the Battle of the Five Armies are all included in "Go and Return". I can't imagine how much the third part will be. Breathtaking. This will be another long wait, and I hope "Go and Come Back" will be worthy of this wait.
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