Desolation of Smaug mini analysis
“Where does your journey end. You seek that what will restore to you the right to rule. The quest to reclaim a homeland and slay a dragon”
Elves, elves, everywhere!
First and foremost. Wow. I was a doubter when all,the actors were raving about the barrels sequence but DAMN! It looks fucking awesome. But now down to business. Even though this is a teaser trailer we can gather a lot. The producers seem to be pushing the fact that there are lots of elves in this movie which is interesting. People just think elves are cooler than dwarves I guess. We did just have a heavily focused dwarves movie so it makes sense that they want viewers to see new things. Also, I see a lot of fans screaming over they fact that there’s 7 seconds of Bilbo. There’s a couple of reasons for that. Lets discuss.
An unexpected journey was the set up for everything to come and it started with bilbo. We embarked from the shire and after that, bilbo only really talked to trolls and Gollum. This isn’t necessarily peters choice to subtract from the book, because the source material doesn’t give him much to work with with bilbo. At the end of every chapter we just hear bilbo complaining about going on a journey and wanting a bed. Tolkien even completely writes him out of the BoFA. For me the trailer gives a huger indication that the story is about to take a “Two Towers” turn. We’re about to get a lot of expansion and story lines that are not in the book much like a lot of the Rohan bits, establishing that world. Also bilbo is not in much of what the desolation of smaug part of the book will be. He has his moment in milk wood rescuing the dwarves and then is absent from much of the lake town politic talk until we get to smaug and the arkenstone. And if my guesses are right, that’s about where the movie will conclude. So in order to flesh out the story, we need to build on characters such as bard who saves lake town, and thranduil who is ruling a forest that has just turned from the greenwood to mirkwood (movie universe). To skip over these would actually take away from the overall story.
Now to talk about the biggies. Tauriel. She looks awesome. No problem here. Interested to see where they are taking her character. Legolas! The producers obviously think he will be a big pull to the movie so he got a lot of screen time in this teaser. Also, it will be interesting to see an elven king interact with his son since that is not an element we’ve dealt with before. Beorn. At first I thought it was just a huge pitbull so when I found out it was beorn, I was thrown off. But the artwork of him is beautiful so I trust well get a better look at him later. The spiders look fucking creepy. SMAUG!!!!! Looks sick. Grimy and old. And fucking huge! Which brings me to the scale. This looks to be huge in scale. We see that as the dwarves climb over the gate statues in erebor.
Now some questions.
Azog can be seen fighting outside mirkwood maybe with tauriel or during the barrels sequence. This begs to question where his story goes from here. Once they reach lake town does he go and gather a full force of orcs? Does he go to dol guldur? Does he get killed? Interesting thoughts.
Gandalf. Will only gandalf and radagast investigate the necromancer? Will others come to fight? Will there be more than one investigation and if so will we see the white council again? The timelines here seem to be fuddled with a bit but gandalf doesn’t necessarily need to be back until the third movie when thranduil comes to the mountain so will we see dol guldur in this movie at all?
What we can gather from the trailer is that there will be many different storylines to follow in desolation of smaug much like the two towers and the journey has taken a darker tone. I think the producers have done a good job at showing the audience who were pissed at the kid charm and light tone of the first, that this will indeed follow The Lord of the Rings more. Either way, 6 months from now, ill be waiting in line.
