Good news for fans of Peter Jackson’s visual tour guide through Middle-earth: the dividing line that split critics over last year’s first entry in the lord of the ring’s adaptation of The Hobbit (subtitled An Unexpected Journey) has shrunk in the second episode, The Desolation of Smaug. That’s to say that a year after the starting point for the new franchise met with mixed reception, Jackson seems to have gotten back on his feet somewhat, proving that all of the groundwork laid in An Unexpected Journey was indeed worth his audience’s while; the new film plays like a roller coaster, punctuated by dips, twists, loop-the-loops, and every other sort of…
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G-S-T Review…The Hobbit
Nine years, eleven Academy Awards, and two massive cinematic disappointments. Since wowing the world in 2001 with The Fellowship of the Ring, the first entry in his adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy series The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson has amassed an impressive tally of goodwill and squandered the lion’s share; as a consequence, his return to Middle Earth, a similar treatment of Rings precursor The Hobbit, has been speculated over with alternating degrees of trepidation, iconoclasm, anticipation, and blatant excitement. Given Jackson’s previous artistic and commercial success playing in this particular fantasy sandbox, as well as his subsequent failures (2005’s King Kong, 2009’s The Lovely Bones), it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where…