Peter Jackson gets his mojo back (largely) for the 2nd Hobbit installment – skips all the long sequences of dwarves singing a cappella while doing the dishes, getting straight into the action and fantastic new locales, requiring craploads of both programmers and carpenters. Some cool action set pieces imaginatively leap off the book’s pages, like dwarves in barrels. Acteur du jour Benedict Cumberbatch snarls away as “the CGI bad guy” (Necromancer/Sauron and Smaug). Plus expert foreshadowing of the central conflicts which we can be sure Jackson will dramatize to the max in the 3rd movie (*spoiler alert* the moral showdown between Bilbo and Thorin and the Battle of the Five Armies).
To pad out the 300 page children’s novel into 9 hours of feature film, Jackson has to add in quite a bit of backstory (like Gandalf and Radagast’s adventures) and some new characters (such as Evangeline “Lost” Lilly’s evoking if-Katniss-Everdeen-were-an-elf), but one can overlook all that for the spectacle … after all, retconning a chaste Elven-Dwarven love triangle is a mostly harmless creative exercise vs. some of the more legendary Hollywood executive pronouncements that were apparently flung around the first trilogy (e.g. Weinstein: “You have to kill one of the hobbits. I don’t care which one.”)
Primeval story-telling meets latest big budget Hollywood CGI extravaganza in Darren Aronofsky’s NOAH, which recasts the Biblical-Babylonian myth in the mould of Peter Jackson’s THE LORD OF THE RINGS – though adding Aronofsky’s trademark exploration of the psychopathic toll that the experience would have had on the protagonist (played by a grizzledly intense Russell Crowe). Ambitiously dives headlong into themes of good vs. evil, human depravity, environmentalism, family ties, and of course, mass catastrophic extinction by drowning. Seriously entertaining.
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