Look a bee! The front of an axe! A severed head! screams Desolation of Smaug as it flies along at a frenetic pace, feeling all the more like a theme park ride than an actual film. All it needed were some water cannons to kick in and douse the front few rows during the barrel scene and with some D-Box seats youd swear you were at Alton Towers. Honestly the amount of random stuff that just comes at the screen every twenty minutes or so is infuriating, and serves only to remind you that 3D is (and has always been) nothing more than a cash-grab, designed to woo the masses into re-enacting one of those adverts you see for such a thing, where the audience are all wide eyed and gawping with astonishment. Does that ever happen though? Of course not, as every time anything comes out of the screen and hits you by way of falling off the screen, all it does is remind you youre in a cinema in the first place, as if you happened to fall for such a thing youll be recollecting yourself anyway. Great films, and especially the Lord of the Rings trilogy, do not need such gimmicks to get us all involved in the story or the action. To be honest if youre falling back on chucking a severed head directly at the screen as a way to make us pay attention, or randomly showing a bee descending on screen, as oppose to the gargantuan spectacles of say, Minas Tirith, Helms Deep or the reveal of something like the Balrog, youve already lost me through lack of decent cinematography. So what did you guys think? As you can tell Critic Rage was in full-flow throughout this piece, but I do stick by each point. Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
