We saw this on the Australia Day holiday, just what one wants to see on a day when we’re celebrating the invasion of our country by ourselves…a movie about liberating a mountain.
It was a great movie, lots of wonderful visual effects and fabulous stunts. There are always things we want to see from the book that they haven’t put in the movie but then there are other parts that they put in and help make things make more sense. They pulled out how the gang met up with Beorn and wrote it a different way so we don’t get to see the dwarfs walk in two by two but instead they run in screaming. On the other hand we do see them actually running from the orcs instead of having the orcs chasing them quietly. I won’t tell you what happens when they meet or the fight scenes as that’s too spoilerish. But they were nicely choreographed.
So many favourite bits but I think my most favourite part was Smaug. They got the look of him just right and fixed up some thoughts in my head about the size of the rooms under the mountain. I had the dragon about the same size as in the movie but the rooms were much smaller and so I could never figure out how Smaug could actually fly in there but they had the rooms being much, much bigger and the flying just worked. Lots of lovely chase scenes in here with some of dialogue sounding exactly as my memory of the book.
It was good having Legolas come into this movie as it helped link up The Hobbit movies with The Lord of the Rings. A few more bits in there that made things make much more sense. I never did quite understand how come dwarfs and elves could work together in The Lord of the Rings after all that animosity but there’s a few bits and pieces in this movie that helps to clear that up.
The actors!!! Lots of gorgeous people, some of them gorgeous because of their looks and some because of their acting…not that the gorgeous looking people aren’t good actors but you know what I mean. I’ll only throw in a handful of names so you understand.
Ian McKellan, the one and only!
Martin Freeman does Bilbo very nicely. We see the transition from a homebody to a hero.
Richard Armitage as Thorin! Who else could have done this part?
James Nesbitt as Bofur. First saw Nesbitt in Cold Feet and he did an absolutely brilliant job as Jekyll.
Aidan Turner as Kili. He was the drop-dead gorgeous vampire in Being Human. Fabulous acting!
And that’s enough. If you haven’t seen it you need to, it does follow the book relatively closely but there are changes to make things work cinematically. Some additions make it better while some deletions I object to as I was looking forward to seeing those scenes in movie form and not just in my head. Now to wait for the third and last movie.