Reviews

This movie is everything I love about movies. It's got great acting, great characters, great story, great dialogue. It's nothing short of amazing.

I haven't seen Farrell in a roll like this before, but he certainly shines. Going from being a brat, to coked up as all hell, to depressed in a matter of minutes and it's hilarious as well as heart breaking.

Gleeson is fantastic in his role too! He plays a perfect mix of cold and calculating, still being sophisticated and also has a conscience of sorts.

Every scene in this movie develops either character or story, and the story unfolds so flawlessly with every passing scene. Going from thinking Ray is just being an arrogant brat to realizing what he has done and why he's acting like he is is a truly fascinating journey, and you can't quite tell whether to laugh or be upset by it, sometimes doing a bit of both at once.

The dialogues and delivery are truly perfect, and it leaves us with so many quotable lines about topics from saving someone you were going to kill from suicide and having a discussion with him about it afterwards to race wars with midgets. Sorry, "Dwarves".

The wife telling Harry to bring "the fellas" as he leaves and him apologizing for calling her an inanimate object because he was upset brings so much depth to characters and their relationship only from a minute-long scene. True magic with regards to acting and dialogue. This is why dialogue and acting is so important. It brings us closer to the person behind the character and gives the story immensely more depth and excitement.

A cinematic masterpiece!

Admittedly, I am biased from having read the wonderful book, but it looks like Peter Jackson has been writing his own story. He keeps making up pointless crap as an excuse to add more CGI and more fighting scenes. If you are looking for mindless fighting, zero dialogue, an overuse of CGI that would leave James Cameron shaking his head in disbelief, then sure, this movie is probably for you! However, if you are looking for the same emotion and magic that the book brings out in you, prepare to be disappointed, over and over again.

Beorn is in the movie for about a minute and has the eloquence of a donkey with autism. Mirkwood before the elves appear is barely five minutes long. Which means the spiders disappear before they even got the chance to appear, and there is no Bombur falling in the water, and nothing to lure them off the path, they just get lost because they are extremely dumb dwarfs. Orcs are chasing them wherever they go, and the barrel- ride out of Mirkwood is a 20-minute long scene where nothing really happens, except a lot of orcs die, and Kili gets shot with a poisonous arrow(?). Then they bribe Bard into smuggling them past the guards into Lake-town. Apparently Bards ancestor shot off a piece of dragon scale under his left wing, so Bard already knows of the Dragon's weakness. No thrush has to tell him anything... All the dwarfs race into Smaug's lair and go on a rat-race in which Smaug is too brainless to actually kill anyone, and when he has an absolutely obvious shot at it, he suddenly has a change of heart and decides to let them live. Also, four of the dwarfs are still in Lake-town tending to the poisoned Kili and fighting orcs with the elves. Make sense? Not really, no. The book has been torched, and Peter Jackson has rewritten it the way it was (probably) intended; as a fighter-book with cool environments, cool people who say cool things, cool dwarven caves and cool statues. The things I have pointen out are only a few of the many changes and disappointments from the movie. Who needs a good story with all this CGI?

The acting is dreadful, the dialogue is dreadful, the CGI is dreadfully overused, the plot is dreadful (it's not the same as the book, believe me.) But the dragon was pretty cool. So therefore: 2/10.