My sister and I rushed to catch the last day of showing of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug this year. The last because on the 25th the cinemas will be showing nothing but entries to this year's Metro Manila Film Festival.
The cinema is packed. I didn't mind. I didn't want to mind anything. Not even the shrilly toddler in the row in front of us that her own mother doesn't seem to notice. But then it was hard to ignore this:
Why on earth do people insist on watching movies that are part of trilogies, or prequels to other movies, then ask for the back story inside the theater? Why do you do that??
So this middle aged man sits in between a teenage girl, who was next to me, and a boy of about ten. The odd thing was that the kids knew jack shit about the story. Seriously, in this day and age I would have thought the kids are always on the pulse of popular culture. Every ten to fifteen minutes one of the kids would ask a question about the story, what's already happening in the movie, or what's going to happen in the movie. If you want to know what's going to happen could you just watch the movie? This movie is PG, but this is ridiculous. And they do this, all three of them including the adult, without even trying to lower their voices. Does this look like your living room?!
While the first movie feels a bit stretched thin, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug feels a bit 'meatier'. It explores new characters, history and places, giving more life and dimension to Middle Earth. Through backstories, we are given an idea of how the inhabitants of Middle Earth lived and how they related to other races. There are also new places shown like Mirkwood, where Legolas comes from. Before this movie, I always sort of just lumped the elves together. I've never really looked at them as different groups possessing differences in attributes.
I liked how this film constantly teases Bilbo, and the audience, with the Ring. Will he use it or won't he? Will he fall prey to it's temptations and it's power? Will he tell Gandalf about the Ring? With the Lord of the Rings Trilogy behind us these questions don't really matter as we already have a pretty good idea of how the story of the Ring would end in this trilogy. It's like an open secret that you still want to hear the nitty gritty details about anyway.
The movie has nice pacing with lots of action, and a love triangle. I definitely did not see that coming. It's amazing how they managed to fit that in but I like it. The visuals are good but it still find it weird sometimes how ridiculously smooth the orcs are (since they're computer generated).
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