Skip to main content

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Review

Image
By
J.R.R. Tolkien must be turning in his grave.

I came away from seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (in a stifling Odeon IMA) in several minds.  It’s true that only about 25% of the film followed the original story and there were a number of scenes that left out detail that could have been included, such as the encounter with Beorn, Bilbo taunting the spiders in Merkwood and Bilbo putting the lids on the barrels before the dwarves are pushed through a hatch into the river by the Wood Elves. Maybe some of these will be featured in the extended edition. I’m also struggling with the fact that there were no Orcs in the book either, just goblins.

After the first thirty minutes I stopped being annoyed and started trying to see the film as a film, rather than as an adaptation of a book. And then it occurred to me that although the Hobbit is an excellent book, it’s quite a simple story and may not translated directly into a film well. Although the film felt unnecessarily long, a lot of the story that was added (invented?) made it excellent. The plot line about Sauron gaining strength is exactly what should have been in the book, it makes for better continuity with the Lord of the Rings. It is of course possible that Tolkien wrote about it, and Gandalfs involvement in other books like The Silmarillion. I don’t know, I haven’t read them, but it did make me think that I would like Peter Jackson to go on and make more of Tolkien’s work into films.

Having said that, the fight scene in the lonely mountain added nothing for me, except more original plot discrepancies. They may as well have put Kili in a red star trek shirt in the Wood Elves prison and I don’t recall any of the dwarves staying behind in Lake Town in the book or any special bowes. And did I mention there weren’t any Orcs in the book? There weren’t many (any?) women in the book either, but I totally fell in love with Tauriel.

I was glad when the film was over, only because it was so long, but I want to see it again.

Comments

  1. Dan O.30 December 2013 at 08:26

    I think it's safe to say that this trilogy has already over-stayed its welcome, but needless to say, I had fun here and I hope they do well with the next, hopefully last installment. Good review Paul.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

By
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
1 comment
Read more

I, Robot

By
The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...
1 comment
Read more

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more