Imagine that one of the best cinematic storytellers of his generation announces that he is going to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet.  Now, you love Shakespeare, and you’re excited to see how a writer and director who has always done things that you enjoy will imagine the Bard’s great love story.  As things get moving on the movie, he announces that instead of one movie, he’s making three, and will be filling out the story with expository material that Shakespeare wrote, but left out of the published work.  Shrugging, you go to see the first movie, and it’s really good.  It tells the story of the young lovers up to the famous balcony scene in its multi-hour arc, and even though there are a few extra things thrown in, you enjoy it and look forward to the next movie.  After a year’s wait, you go to see the next movie, and even though it’s a well-told story, has great acting, and has outstanding visual effects and scenery, it’s not Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet anymore.  This middle movie, in order to jazz up and fill out the story just a bit more, has a subplot of swashbuckling where Puck, the jokester from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is searching the sewers of Verona for an ancient artifact that will settle the feud between the Montagues and Capulets.  In order to make things a little easier to film, the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt is turned from a duel with swords into a hand-to-hand martial arts fight, and when Romeo kills Tybalt, it’s more of an accident.  Plus, Mercutio and Tybalt were secretly gay lovers.  The movie ends just as Romeo buys his poison, and you are left with the last 10 pages of the play to fill out the next three-hour movie.

Now, change Shakespeare to Tolkien, and change Romeo and Juliet to The Hobbit, and you have my experience last night with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  To be blunt, I enjoyed this movie immensely, but I left the theater pissed off.  Peter Jackson, who is an excellent storyteller, writer, and movie maker, took the framework of a children’s bedtime story, filled in plot elements from Tolkien’s other works to make it into an adult movie, and then iced the cake with characters that weren’t in the original story, including a love triangle that doesn’t belong.

I’m not going to add a plot synopsis, because like I said when I wrote about the first movie in the series, if you haven’t read The Hobbit, you’re cheating yourself and I don’t want to ruin it for you.  There may be a few spoilers in the last couple of paragraphs here, but I’ll make sure to warn you before they begin.

Just as in the first movie, the acting in this installment was outstanding.  The returning actors from the Lord of the Rings trilogy picked up just where they left off, and the new characters (principally the dwarves) are almost exactly as I envision them when I read the book.  Benedict Cumberbatch, who provides the voice of Smaug, was an excellent choice, and turns in what is probably the best performance of the movie.  Unfortunately, the character of Bilbo is a bit diminished in this chapter.  Even though he is supposed to be the principle character of the story, I kind of feel that this movie becomes the story of Thorin, and Bilbo is just a supporting character.  Yes, he still has a part in all the important scenes, but I don’t get the feeling I had in the first movie that it’s about the actions and development of Bilbo anymore.

Even though this is a three-hour movie, it doesn’t feel like it.  Even with all of the additional material and downright padding that Jackson has put in to stretch what should have been either one really long movie or two kind-of long movies into three long movies, I never noticed how long I’d been sitting in my seat.  However, the place that Jackson chose to end this chapter and begin the third movie leads me to believe that the next installment will have a lot more padding and additional material.  Honestly, if you’re tracking the story with the book as the movies go on, there are less than 100 pages left for Jackson to fill three hours with.

As expected, the visual effects are outstanding.  Jackson is a master of knitting CGI with live action, and Howard Shore’s score is woven expertly throughout the movie.  Irish Woman commented about how the visuals in this movie were better than even the first chapter of the trilogy, which came out only a year ago.

Overall, if you’re looking for an action movie with good acting, great visuals, and an enjoyable plot, this one is worth paying full price at the movie theater.  It’s not for young kids, but the theater had everything from teenagers up to senior citizens in the seats.

However, if you’re a long-time fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, there are a few things you should know.  (Avast, ye swabs!  There be spoilers ahead!  Read on at yer own risk!)

If you’re the kind of fan who refuses to admit that Starship Troopers was ever made into a movie, you’re going to have issues with The Desolation of Smaug.  Like I said, Jackson has added quite a bit to this story, but has also stripped out a lot.

An example of this is how the group meets Beorn, the “skin-changer” who helps them get to the entrance to Mirkwood.  In the book, Gandalf convinces Beorn to take in Bilbo and the dwarves by having them arrive in dribs and drabs, and before Beorn knows it, he has a house full of guests.  It’s a rather comical vignette that I enjoy reading, both to myself and to my children.  In Jackson’s opening scene, the group runs into Beorn’s house at top speed because Beorn is trying to catch and kill them.  Things like this are scattered through the movie.

Jackson continues to play up the presence and influence of the Ring in the movie, and I can accept that.   He’s done a pretty good job of turning what was, to Tolkien, a plot device, into a malevolent story element.  It’s done a bit more heavily-handed in this installment, but it’s not terrible.

In the same vein, the sub-plot of Gandalf’s activities when he’s away from the group is woven in pretty well.  Sending him off to investigate the Necromancer and discover what is going on at Gol Dolgur is, to me, a valid addition to the story line and makes it more interesting to adults and fans of the LOTR movies.

A big thing that caught in my craw, however, was the addition of Legolas and Tauriel, and the love triangle they fill out when Killi starts to fall for Tauriel.  I’ve read quite a bit of Tolkien, and I never remember a love affair between an Elvish prince, an Elvish she-badass, and a dwarf.  And unlike a lot of things that Jackson does with the story, this thread is interwoven in a very clumsy manner.  It’s almost as though having a love story as part of the plot was an afterthought, and it doesn’t dovetail very well with the rest of the story.

In addition to this, Jackson adds more action to the movie by having the orcs continue to track the group all the way through the Elven kingdom to Laketown, whose guards appear to be so inept that they not only don’t notice a large group of orcs and two elves infiltrating their town, but also miss a protracted running street fight between the elves, some dwarves, and the orcs.  This wasn’t in the original material, and seems to have been added to pad the story and to keep the attention of those who don’t just enjoy a good story.  In fact, there are fight sequences and plot elements that seem to be directly lifted from the LOTR scripts.  All of this could have been and should have been left out.

Another way that Jackson modifies the storyline is what happens during and after Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug after he goes down into the dwarven city under the Lonely Mountain.  In the book, Bilbo goes down into the dragon’s horde and has a rich, dialogue driven encounter with Smaug.   When Smaug becomes enraged, leaves the mountain, and tries to burn out the dwarves from the side of the mountain, they hide in the stairs and wait for Bilbo to come back.  In Jackson’s edition, Bilbo’s encounter with Smaug is a bit more exciting than I’d visualized it, which to be honest I enjoyed quite a bit, but then he twists the plot so that the dwarves come down into the mountain to look for Bilbo, and they all have an epic fight with Smaug before he takes off to burn Laketown.   While it was an exciting sequence and was very well done, it runs counter to Tolkien’s story for no reason that I can see other than to add more action scenes and pad the runtime of the movie.

That all being said, it’s an enjoyable movie.  If you can get over the additions and modifications that Jackson has made, it’s definitely worth the three hours and the price of a ticket.