Because +Dave Hill asked – a look at the ending of the Desolation of Smaug. Spoilers and dwarf fanboy love abound.
One More Hobbit/Desolation Post: Closure |
After my post yesterday, Dave asked me what I thought about the ending of the movie. He was a bit vague with the wording of the question, possibly to keep from spoiling people reading the conversation on G+, but as I’ve read his thoughts on the subject, I had a pretty good idea what he was …
I said to my wife this weekend that Tolkien did his readers a disservice in the manner in which the dwarves and Smaug interacted. Hey that was non-spoilery!
1000 times this!
Well, now I see why you didn't just dash off a quick comment about it. Well-played, well said, and let me ponder about that.
Without digging out the previous disc — do we see any setup for the Big Thing Thorin Figures Out to Do in the opening scenes of An Unexpected Journey, as we're touring Erebor and seeing the arrival of the dragon? Because that would alleviate about 40% of my disdain for the execution of the final action sequence (I understand and fully agree with your rationale as to why it happened).
Just checked, and no.
That said, I really don't have a problem with the idea that just prior to the Dragon showing up, they were about to cast a massive gold statue to the king. Would have been nice to have it led in a bit, but it makes sense enough I don't mind.
Yeah, I'm a bit less sanguine — it makes sense (actually, lots of sense, all things considered), but so would any number of other things that could have been pulled out of thin air. I'd have much preferred to have seen the gun on the mantelpiece. (Hmmmm … extended edition, perhaps.)
I thought for awhile about what else they could have done, and while there are certainly other options, the obvious stuff is right out.
I mean, they can't set off some kind of trap or 'normal' defense – if such a thing existed, it would have been used already, and failed.
So, they have to do something, it needs to be part of their 'home', and it has to be something no one would have thought to do the first time.
That doesn't limit options to one, but it does narrow the field to a fairly small subset of "crazy but just might work."
That said, I do agree that the whole thing would have been much more satisfying with ANY kind of foreshadowing, and doubly so if it had happened all the way back in a first movie flashback.
They clearly needed to have interspersed flashbacks to a planning scene, like any good caper movie.
Flashing on an "A-team" montage scene (with dwarves) …
And there's our next RPG campaign seed.