The Hobbit: 5 Lessons From The Desolation Of Smaug That Will Make The Third Film Great

Last year The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey arrived with a bang and exited with a whimper. While the technological advances were huge, the storytelling seemed to take several steps back from the level of maturity achieved in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Of course, maturity is not necessarily the first word that comes to mind when one thinks of The Hobbit. It's a story originally intended for children, even though J.R.R. Tolkien himself attempted to rewrite it in later years, to match the complexity of his Rings saga. Jackson is now making the same attempt with his Hobbit trilogy. But with the first film he made the mistake of attempting to broaden and dramatize a story that just didn't have the weight he needed it to. He attempted to fix this problem by adding in material from Tolkien's appendices that didn't really fit. Moreover, the pace of the movie was so slow that Bilbo and the Dwarves may as well have been belly-crawling to Erebor. This mix of unneeded material, bad CGI and bloated pacing slowed The Hobbit down into disappointing muck. So why was Desolation of Smaug so much better? This is the question we'll explore over the next 5 sections. Just why Desolation of Smaug was such an improvement, and the things Jackson is hopefully keeping in mind as he moves towards completing the film film. These are the 5 lessons from Desolation of Smaug that will make the third film great.