The middle section of the Hobbit story is made up of a series of minor adventures whilst Bilbo and the dwarf's continue their journey towards the Lonely Mountain and Smaug the Dragon's lair.
Firstly there is a brief stay with Beorn, a Grizzly Adams sort of guy, who can metamorphose into a bear. He represents the wild and unpredictable nature of the great outdoors, for although he offers shelter and food, there is never the feeling that the visitors are completely safe or at ease. They remain locked indoors at night whilst the bear roams in the moonlight.
Next comes the dark and sinister Mirkwood, which is almost a character itself. The trees grow so thick that there is nothing else to see and the canopy blocks out the sun's warmth and light. Within its depths, Bilbo develops courage and a fearlessness that will enable him to face Smaug at the end of the quest.
Without the fight with giant spiders and the clever plan to help the dwarfs escape the Wood Elves Kingdom, Bilbo would be less convincing as the burglar who walks into the mountainside.
When Bilbo does enter the Lonely Mountain and retrieves a gold cup, the whole daunting and seemingly impossible mission becomes more real. There never was a plan once they had got this far. The dialogue between Bilbo and Smaug echoes the scenes with Gollum, with every word carefully chosen to flatter or trick the other.
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The Film
The second in the Hobbit trilogy clocks in at near three hours, which felt much too long. Given that the film ends pretty close to the conclusion of the story, I wondered why they couldn't have cut this one shorter and incorporated more of the scenes with Smaug into the third film.
The episodes with Beorn and in Mirkwood are dealt with fairly rapidly. The disorientation of the woods is dealt with like a druggy hallucination (Bilbo follows Bilbo) and with no lure of elvish feasts. The spiders are genuinely scary - there is something about bodies wrapped up in web which is really creepy. As the film continues it begins to build on the novel considerably, with the bulking out of Lake Town and attempts to defeat Smaug under the mountain.
The re-introduction of Legolas is a link to the past films (future story) but adds nothing to the plot. Similarly Evangeline Lilly's Tauriel adds a token bit of cross dwarf-elvish romance with Aidan Turner's Kili, but has no relevance to the plot. They are there as help to combat the White Ogres, who are also additions to the plot! That said, the barrel chase where the dwarfs are escaping the Wood Elf Kingdom down whitewater rapids chased by ogres and elves is a highlight of the film with lots of knockabout humour.
It is interesting that in the book, Bilbo does not hide the fact he has a ring that makes him invisible from the rest of the group, but in the film they are kept in the dark as to how Bilbo wanders through the Elven halls and rescues them from prison. The ring is given its more darker quality in the film, as we already know it is the One Ring. Bilbo begins to be possessed by its power.
As guessed from the first film, the Necromancer is revealed to be Sauron in a clever bit of imagery that turns a flaming wizard into the all seeing eye. It will be interesting to watch these films in sequence once complete, to see if they all tie in logically. I am not sure that Gandalf mentions any previous encounters with Sauron in Fellowship of the Ring, for instance.
The first meeting of Bilbo and Smaug is delightful to watch but gives way to the bang crash and fail of a plan to get the dwarf furnaces fired up and melt the dragon, which all felt a bit unnecessary to me.
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