TOW #16 - The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Review by Zaki Hasan

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is the second movie in The Hobbit trilogy. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, continues his journey with the Wizard Gandalf and thirteen Dwarves in order to reclaim the Dwarven Kingdom from the evil dragon Smaug. Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

                Zaki Hasan, a hardcore Lord of the Ring fan, gives his candid opinion of the movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug to his fellow audience of movie-lovers. At first, he writes his previous experience of the Lord of the Ring trilogy a little over eleven years ago when he "Could. Not. Wait" (Hasan 1) for the saga's continuation. Hasan claims to have "enjoyable enough experience" with the first movie of The Hobbit trilogy, An Unexpected Journey, but not enough for him to watch it "an embarrassingly high number of times in the theater, and a few more times on home vid" like he did with The Fellowship of the Ring, the first movie of the Lord of the Ring trilogy. However, the biggest letdown was the recent movie The Desolation of Smug which Hasan describes it as "a three hour story with no beginning and no end" with "lots of middle" (Hasan 2-3). Don't get him wrong, he loves how the cast returns, including the elf archer Legolas played by Orlando Bloom, but he believes the movie to be "simply too much time spent servicing too little". He explains how Tolkien's book is a "breezy 300-page confection" while the trilogy Peter Jackson is making is a "nine-hour behemoth" (Hasan 5) out of it. Hasan admits that he sees the concept "why make one flick, or even two, when you can just as well make three movies, and three times the coin? After all, there were three hugely-successful Lord of the Rings movies, right?" (Hasan 6) but argues that Lord of the Ring trilogy was each movie adapted on one book while The Hobbit is forcing one book to be three movies to the point that the movies almost are their own separate entities. Hasan makes his review credible and effective by juxtaposing one Tolkien's trilogy with another. I believe that little humorous comments he makes during the review - like when he references The Desolation of Smaug as "a desolate slog" (Hassan 8) - make the readers to easily share his views.