The Hobbit: 8 Blunders That Ruined The Desolation Of Smaug
5. The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Bilbo Baggins
Wheres Bilbo throughout this film? There was a point just after the halfway mark where Bilbo re-enters the picture, where Id actually forgotten he was in it in the first place! Where in the book Bilbos thought-processes and comments on everything were front and centre, here hes essentially relegated to a fairly perfunctory side-role, chiming in every now and then to provide the audience-reaction to some things, yet for the most part he plays second-fiddle to Richard Armitages Thorin Oakenshield. Id wager a good chalice of mead that you cant tell me one additional thing about Bilbos character from this film that we didnt already know. Instead hes been turned into a one-liner-quipping badass, as gone are the in-book reflections on his more standard cake-loving life, the contrast of which provided him with some pretty infallible charm and an everyman determination to succeed despite increasingly dangerous odds. Yes of course hes the one who initially takes on Smaug before the gang join in, and he frees them from the spider-horde as well as the Elven dungeons, but is he particularly taxed by this? Does he seem exacerbated to the point of mental exhaustion than a dragon bigger than anything hes ever seen is now conversing with him? As with many of the exaggerated aspects of the film, it seems the characters are just as happy to go along with the events of the film as were supposed to be. Aside from one key scene where the ever-flustered Bilbo of the original work seems to surface when he fears he may lose the ring, for the most part I didnt think the gravity of his situation came across as well as it could have.
