The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Not just The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but, thanks to DLL, in 3D at the IMAX. The biggest screen in the UK. The only UK cinema screen housed in a cylinder on a Waterloo roundabout.

I've an admission to make: I preferred The Hobbit to Lord of the Rings. Probably because I read the Hobbit at the right age, an age at which I struggled with the daunting size and scope, and the endless campfire songs and digressions of the three-part masterpiece. The right age was older for Ulysses. Several aborted attempts, and I was over forty when I got through what is now a favourite novel that I've since reread. Same with In Search of Lost Time and the Beckett novels.

The opposite with, say Graham Greene, an author I found easy to devour in late teens and early twenties, but one I've found it impossible to revisit since.

Another admission: I don't see any problem with a film maker taking nine hours over a book that, while much shorter than a singe volume of Lord of the Rings, still isn't pamphlet-thin and must take more than nine hours to read.

We found some things out on the way. When you have tickets for something, or somewhere to get to other than work, trains are delayed. Sevenoaks station is so badly signposted it must be almost a state secret. If ever you need to beg, the car park is full of people generous with their change, however, the car park is even more secret than the station. When you're crunching painkillers to calm an ankle down, there's not going to be a seat on the train.

The film's great. I don't know how critics manage to write about movies without giving too much away. Martin Freeman's Bilbo is much less overwrought than Elijah Wood's Frodo. Dwarves have more natural comic potential than elves. The skin-changer's cool. Smaug's got a lot to say, but he is a huge fire-breathing dragon so probably didn't get told to shut up enough when he was a whelp or a fledgeling. He looks spectacular, briefly, in gold. Laketown's a Dickensian rookery on sea, you can almost smell the fish oil and tar, ruled by Stephen Fry, yomping about being a sort of Tolkeinesque Boris Johnson. We noticed some evolution (maybe reverse, as this is a prequel): dwarves' hands are getting proportionately larger, as are hobbits' feet (and harier, too). Legolas' eyes are getting bluer.

The theme parks will soon have dwarf barrel falls and Lonely Mountain mines rollercoaster rides.

In you have to move with the times corner: 3D is now mature. Less wow, perhaps, but less seasick inducing and impossible to follow (see Spiderman). Less of a new toy, more of an enhancement.

One thing is absolutely for sure, when she watches this, BLISS is definitely not going to be happy about the ending. Not one little bit.