(This review may contain spoilers).
This now makes the third time I’ve seen this film. I read the book years ago, but still can’t quite understand how they made three films from it.
I did really like the first film and I also really liked this one, apart from one character who has really not worked, at least in my opinion. There are quite a few amusing moments in this film and I feel that the actors work particularly well. I’ve seen several of them in other films/television shows and I felt it was easy to see them as different characters.
In the first film, Kili became my favourite character, hands-down. In this film, he was joined by Bard. (I apparently like archers). I especially liked Kili and Fili and would have liked to see more brother moments.
The imagery in this film worked particularly well. I did watch this with audio description and couldn’t help noticing a large amount of description directed at one character. It’s really not necessary to refer to a character as beautiful twice in the same scene. (And delicate, feminine hands is just… urgh).
The voice actor of Smaug also worked particularly well. I thought he did a really good job. There were some tense scenes, even considering I already know what’s going to happen. I’m not pleased about certain things that were changed from the book. I think it should have stayed truer to the source material.
Apart from that, this film was really well-made and quite a lot of work clearly went into it. There are some truly beautiful scenes and imagery that works really well. I do intend to watch the final film.
Ink of Blood 