I left The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey with a lot of disgust. At the time, it felt an hour too long, with too many unnecessary plot elements added in. However poorly I felt upon leaving the theater, I still felt the need to see the next movie in the trilogy. I also felt the need to watch the first again. Can't remember a movie I disliked that much that I still wanted to see again.
Since I already knew the original text was being altered, my expectations for The Desolation of Smaug were more in line with reality. This was immensely helpful, as it allowed me to enjoy the movie, for the most part.
Desolation picks up with the Dwarven company still running from Orcs and Wargs. They manage to evade with the help of Beorn, a shapeshifter, who provides them with horses in order to reach Mirkwood. That's when shit gets hairy. Gandalf leaves them to their own devices and the group promptly gets lost, attacked by spiders, then saved and captured by wood elves, led by an epic asshole named Thranduil. They escape the elves through the cunning of Bilbo, only to run into trouble with the men of Laketown. After an empassioned speech to a greedy mayor with an unctuous assistant, the dwarves make it to the Lonely Mountain, enter, and get to pissing off Smaug.
While all of that is happening, Gandalf is off investigating the Necromancer and getting into trouble of his own.
Just like the first movie, this one is long. For the most part it is entertaining, but I found the Laketown politics to be boring. It's hard to convince me that part of the story is interesting. Maybe I will be proven wrong in the final installment.
Spoiler alert: My only real complaint is where this movie ends. They don't kill Smaug, they just piss him off. The result is a movie that has no resolution. It's not a self contained story, which is one of my biggest pet peeves. Even the awful second Pirates of the Caribbean had a resolution at the end. Why couldn't they just kill Smaug, a natural place to end a movie?
I re-watched both The Unexpected Journey and the animated Hobbit from the 70s before seeing Desolation. There's a bunch of dialog in the animated version that is used almost word-for-word in the live action versions. It makes me want to re-read the book and see if that's where the words originated, or if Peter Jackson is just a big fan of the Rankin and Bass version. It is pretty sweet.
Once you get over the bastardization of the original text, these movies are pretty enjoyable.
First Viewing: 3+2+2+2+3 = 12