The dragon takes his time. That is the central fact of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Peter Jackson’s 2013 middle chapter, and it is both the film’s best argument and its heaviest burden. At 161 minutes, this is a movie that spends most of its runtime getting somewhere, and the somewhere — a conversation with a talking dragon inside a mountain of gold — is worth the trip.
Trailer, via Warner Bros..
Bilbo Baggins and the Ring He Won’t Put Down
The film picks up where An Unexpected Journey left off. Bilbo, played by Martin Freeman, has escaped the Misty Mountains with the One Ring in his pocket. He and Thorin Oakenshield’s company are still trying to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from Smaug. Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf the Grey, who splits from the group early to investigate the ruins of Dol Guldur, where a long-forgotten evil is stirring.
Jackson and his co-writers — Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro — know what they have in Freeman. The scenes where Bilbo uses the ring are the film’s most interesting, because the ring is starting to use him back. When Bilbo drops it in Mirkwood and kills a giant centipede to get it back, the film shows a flash of something ugly. It is a small moment. It lands harder than most of the bigger ones.
Mirkwood and the Spiders
The middle stretch is where The Desolation of Smaug earns its keep as an adventure film. The company loses the path in Mirkwood and gets caught by giant spiders. Bilbo frees them with the ring. Then the Wood-elves arrive — Legolas, played by Orlando Bloom, and Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly — and take the dwarves prisoner. Lee Pace’s King Thranduil gets a confrontation with Thorin that gives Richard Armitage his best scene in the trilogy.
The Barrel Escape
What follows is the barrel escape. The dwarves ride empty wine barrels down a river while Wood-elves chase them and Bolg’s orc party ambushes everyone. The result is a three-way battle on moving water, and this writer’s view is that it is the most purely fun sequence Jackson has staged in Middle-earth since the first trilogy. Kíli takes a Morgul shaft during the escape. Tauriel chooses to leave her kingdom to help him. Thranduil seals his borders after an orc captive reveals an army amassing in the south.
The Cast of The Desolation of Smaug
- Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey
- Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins
- Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield
- Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug and Sauron
- Orlando Bloom as Legolas
- Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel
- Lee Pace as King Thranduil
- Luke Evans as Bard
- Stephen Fry as The Master of Laketown
Benedict Cumberbatch Is the Whole Reason This Works
The dragon is the reason to watch this film. Benedict Cumberbatch voices Smaug, and the performance is the best thing in the movie. Smaug is vain, clever, and patient. He talks to Bilbo before he eats him, and the screenplay lets that conversation run. It is the one scene where The Desolation of Smaug slows down for the right reasons.
The film was shot in 3D at 48 frames per second, with principal photography in New Zealand and at Pinewood Studios. Additional filming ran through May 2013. That technical ambition is visible in the barrel sequence and the dragon’s hoard, where the extra frames make the motion feel different from anything else in the trilogy. Whether that difference is an improvement is a separate question. The Desolation of Smaug premiered in Los Angeles on 2 December 2013, opened in New Zealand on 12 December, and reached the United States on 13 December.
Luke Evans and Stephen Fry in Laketown
The Laketown detour is where the film sags. Luke Evans plays Bard, a bargeman with a grudge and a family. Stephen Fry plays the Master of Laketown, a role the film treats as comic relief. Fry is having fun. The movie is not sure what to do with him.
The problem is structural. This is the second instalment of a trilogy built from one 1937 novel by J. R. R. Tolkien, and the padding shows. Azog the Defiler and his son Bolg pursue the company across the whole film, and neither is a character so much as a plot device. Azog gets summoned to Dol Guldur by the Necromancer and told to marshal his forces for war. He delegates the hunt to Bolg. That is the entire arc.
The extended edition adds Antony Sher as Thrain, Thorin’s father, held captive in Dol Guldur. It also packs in cameos: Peter Jackson reprising his role as the man eating a carrot in Bree, his daughter Katie as Barliman Butterbur’s wife Betsy, Stephen Colbert and his family as Lake-town spies, and Brian Sergent and Peter Vere-Jones voicing the spiders of Mirkwood. Vere-Jones died in January 2021, making this his final performance.
What The Desolation of Smaug Gets Right
The film received mostly positive reviews and grossed $959 million worldwide. That number is not an argument for the film’s quality. The Desolation of Smaug is a 161-minute middle chapter that exists to set up a third one, and it carries that weight unevenly.
What works, works because of performance. Freeman’s Bilbo is warmer and more cunning than the first film allowed. Armitage’s Thorin gets real anger to play. Cumberbatch’s Smaug is a genuine creation, a dragon who talks like a man who has never been told no. The barrel sequence is a set piece that justifies the whole enterprise.
What does not work is the sprawl. The Necromancer subplot, the Nazgûl tombs, the Dol Guldur investigation — these threads are here to connect this trilogy to The Lord of the Rings, and they cost the film its momentum. Gandalf leaves the company, warns them to stay on the path, and disappears into a storyline that pays off somewhere else.
The film’s tagline promises “the greatest danger of all” beyond the desolation. That danger is Smaug, and the film knows it. Every scene that is not building toward the dragon is marking time. The ones that are building toward him are why this chapter is worth returning to, even when the road there is longer than it needs to be.
This paper’s view is that The Desolation of Smaug is the strongest of the three Hobbit films, though that is a low bar and not a great one to clear. It is a movie carried by a dragon, a ring, and a hobbit who is starting to understand what he is carrying. Everything else is scaffolding.
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