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Omnipotrent — The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug (SPOILERS)
Published: 2014-01-22 23:04:48 +0000 UTC; Views: 4988; Favourites: 71; Downloads: 2
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SPOILERS
Assuming you've already seen the second movie, this is something I made after seeing the midnight premiere, as this was a question/topic on nearly everyones lips walking out of the theater.
We didn't dislike the movie, but this scene threw us.
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Comments: 93
I guess that was another problem I had, he should've been able to eat them all 5 different times
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What can I say...its a kids movie
I just know I'm going to be distraught with the next movie when Smaug dies
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The point of using the gold to cover Smaug was the hope that it would harden, thus trapping him in gold which is heavy. The statue was already there, just hidden.
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No, it was poured, fashioned, and molded behind that tarp. The MOLD had always been there, they did MAKE the statue on the spot.
And of course the reaction of Smaug after getting out of the gold was to...go after the lake men...instead of just killing the dwarves off who were right, freaking, there.
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Fair point. And another fair point. And with it put like that, wow, Smaug is kind of a stupid dragon
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Which he isn't, which is why i'm mad they made him seem like one. I mean he didn't even SEE/SMELL/HEAR them under him when they walked along the bridge
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I don't know... you'd think a **fire** drake doesn't burn that easily if at all. I mean if he did then every time that he would breathe fire he'd burn himself 
The first time I saw the movie I actually facepalmed over that whole scene. They could of expanded on the 3 minutes of Beorn and shown Gandalf's ruse. They could of shown Bombur fall into the Enchanted River if they needed filler, it would have made a lot more sense than going off cannon with the statue. Just having Smaug chase Bilbo around before busting out to roast Laketown would have been a better ending.
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I'm going to make a blog here of how it could have ended
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I can explain this scene perfectly!! ^3^ The most important thing about it is the poetic symbolism it carries, saying so much without saying anything. The statue was meant to be a haunting image of the mighty dwarf heritage that runs deep in the mountain, and how it truly is a lot more powerful than Smaug believes himself to be, and that Erebor belongs to the dwarves, not the thief dragon who desolated their kingdom and beyond to hoard the vast treasure mound within it... It's a realization Smaug doesn't want to admit due to his own pride, but finds to be frighteningly real. And so what if the drown-the-dragon-with-gold plan didn't work out for Thorin and company? If it had succeeded, Smaug wouldn't be able to burn Laketown and be finally slain by Bard's black arrow! Besides, it was almost near the end of the movie, so Peter Jackson must have figured that it needed something big and meaningful to make up for a lack of a better climax, since it cuts off right before Smaug's final act of destruction in the story...
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Except for these complications:
1. It didn't work, as it wouldn't work. Smaug WAS more powerful then the might of the dwarves, as was proven by his ravaging them down to the last child that remained in Erebor. It wasn't the might of dwarves or men even that brought him down, it was l small Thrush which Bilbo had something to do with, the representation is the littlest of things, like a Hobbit or a small bird...could change the events of the world. Epic foreshadowing.
2. It was one of the most inconceivable plans as well as parts of the movie. To make the forge, to build the statue, in hopes that it pours all over him....in hopes that he end up in that room, is one of the most convoluted things they could have done. It would have been far simply to have them stick with the theme of using their wit, and cunning, and knowledge of their home to simply use the forge, and then lure him to where they could dump the contents of the gold vats on him, and try to drown him that way.
3. Smaug's pride is immense, but not all together unwarrented, and his FALL is one of the best parts because again, he falls due to the acts of the smallest and most innocent of creatures. Fire and Death, with claws like swords, and wings like a hurricane, brought down by a bugler, a thrush, and a single arrow of lowly bargeman.
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... Eh, I'm willing to push the lack of logic of that scene aside anyway. X3 Smaug himself, for me, makes up for almost every mistake in the movie! 
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the barrel shots were forgivable to me, to me they took smaug during his chase scene and dumbed him down by a lot.
I mean think about it, "I sense you, smell your air, I hear you..." and of course the fact it's freaking Smaug, you think he'd be able to tell that the dwarves were RIGHT, **CKING, UNDER HIM ON THAT BRIDGE....while whispering not very quietly....in an ECHOING TREASURE HOLD.
Also the amount of times he could've eaten them and didn't cause i guess he forgot how to "fast" was silly. And then him flying to lake town as opposed to eating the dwarves who were if you remember, RIGHT THERE...right there, in front of him...after he came out of the gold.
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... Maybe he just wanted to see the dwarves suffer by making them witness the massacre of a village before eating them? 
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Look, i didn't WANT the dwarves eaten, I just thought it was an assign thing for Peter Jackson to do, and an insult to Smaug's intelligence. It would be like having Aragorn not kill an Uruk about to grab Frodo, it's just out of character, and what's more out of their believablity given how clever we know them to be, and it's Frigging SMAUG.
I'd LOVE for it to be book accurate, book accurate meaning that Smaug is competent, conniving and cruel, and is NOT all talk...meaning he would have seen/sensed/heard/smelled the air of the dwarves that were literally a yard and a half bellow him......in a Cavern he's explored for years and knows the crevices of.....and ESPECIALLY if he knows the scent of dwarf.
The Sauron subplot i'm fine with, because hey? Gandalf WAS doing snooping about him while he was gone, and I love that they're paying attention to that...but they screwed themselves in the Hobbit hole when they made Gandalf SEE. HIM.
For FRIG SAKE!
NOW all of that surprise and rewarded paranoia of "I KNEW IT! I KNEW HE WAS BACK! and THAT RING IS THE ONE!" in Fellowship of the Ring makes no sense because now Gandalf cannot have a shadow of a doubt that he saw Sauron.
In truth, the White Council and even he suspected it was the Witch King who governed the evils in Dol Guldur, and even they weren't that convinced, but Gandalf was. And it was his persistence that it was, and that it meant his master was back which lead him to continue this trail till it lead to Bilbo's Birthday party.
ALL. OF. THAT. ^ IS. NOW. SHOT!
-face palm-
CONTINUITY MR. JACKSON? IS IT THAT HARD?
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... Feel better now? It seemed like you needed to get a LOT off your chest.
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Kinda, but do you get my point?
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All too well. That's QUITE a critique of the movie there... But hey, it's extremely well developed and thought over, I'll give you that!
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You're very welcome! ^^
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Amen to that! I was rather disappointed by the second film. I did like the action, but only if I accepted it alone. When I thought about the book I became nostalgic for the fairy tale Tolkien had explained, and sad the representation wasn't as heartwarming.
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I'll be making a "how it could've been" for the movie.
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They were trying to melt Smaug with heated liquid gold O_o; The statue was just a way to get the non-solidified gold into the chamber to hopefully damage him in some way. It looked like it drowned him for a short while, while instead just pissing him off. Have you melted gold before or any metal at all? It is EXTREMELY dangerous and will cause first degree burns in a heartbeat. Smithing metals is extremely dangerous and they used the resources around them to assist them with the dragon.
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Couldn't they have just, POURED it ON him? Like from the vats? Instead of intricately making a Statue...which resembled cheese fondue when it melted?
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I hate doing this nit picking thing, I really do but the vats? You mean the vents, that controls the fumes from the smithed metal? The vents only go up to release the fumes, so how would you pour liquid up? What you think of the visual effects aside, what the main objective was to cover Smaug in hot metal to kill him. Thorin and Balin were there when the golden statue was being constructed, so they knew that a pathway was made earlier to let the gold run from the melting pots to the statue's mold in the hallway. That statue held an immense amount of hot gold and would not have time to cool, so if they broke it with Smaug in the right place, they could possibly melt him. They used what was already there, tricked Smaug into setting the fires to get the plan moving. Just Pour it on him? Did you see the huge smithing pots that were 10x as big as one of the dwarves? They couldn't lift one of them in time to just even hover it over Smaug's head and let alone, Smaug isn't stupid. He would immediately see what they were trying to do and the plan would fail. No matter what you think of this, I think it's a clever maneuver on the dwarves part with the little time they had to plan and take action. Sadly it didn't work, so we get another movie!
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I'm well aware of the foundries of the mine hold, this is more of a movie critique, meaning directly at Peter Jackson and the writers.
Why did they think it was necessary to make a gold statue to best Smaug with? Why couldn't they have written it with vats, or forges, or a literal pouring basin to lure him into where gold's meant to be poured so as to drown and encase him in it.
Why a statue, it's just so out of the way and impractical in so far that so much of it depended on Smaug ending up in the hall of kings.
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Sounds like you didn't, my mistake.
I think the creative team thought they needed a huge amount of gold melted for a specific reason. If the gold was just melted down for jewelry, the stations wouldn't be set to melt that amount of gold or any melt The statue, as unlikely as it seems, seemed to be some best way for a pathway large enough hot melt from one room to another for a specific purpose. The king was stated to be lost in his obsession with the gold, so to me it would be likely that he would make his smiths make that statue for him. You know how hot metal is melted. It has never been tested, as far as we know in middle earth, if it can kill or hurt a dragon. And it looked like for a time that Smaug was encased in it, but it didn't set enough for him to drown in. And it didn't look like that much gold to drown the whole cave in.
If they lured him in as themselves as the bait, which they did. It wouldn't be that hard. Smaug had no idea what the rocks were for, so it worked out. I'm done with this, accept what you want but I think it is a good concept.
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That made no sense. Did they expect turn Smaug in a golden statue or what? Perhaps they thought he would get burnt..... It was waste of time. The time they spent to film all this bullshit could be used to portray things that wasn't well portrayed in the beggining of the film, like the beautiful lands of Beorn and things that they didn't show in Mirkwood.
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I agreed, i'm going to make a post of how it should have gone soon
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You should've heard the theatre I was in.
At the end, we all groaned in unison.
It was the most synchronized thing that a full theatre of people (it was the day it was released) had ever done without it being planned.
Along with one guy standing up in his seat and started shouting things like "OH DANG FLIPPER-FLAPPIN..."
My friend leaned over to me and said "He's from Tumblr". I just nodded.
I was confused about that too, rather than the fact that it was made of liquid gold. They probably hoped that Smaug was like:
**in awe at shininess and gold. suddenly realizes face. it begins to melt and flood over him** I guess... showing him that the king would never die until Smaug reaches his end?
But then of course, Smaug decided to be a badass dragon and emerge from the gold like "HAAAA YOU FOOLISH FOOLS" and flew off to Laketown.
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I'm really starting to get this weird image of Peter Jackson playing with action figures on screen like a boy...
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That might..not be all that far from the truth
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I really wish there was a 
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I half expected him to pop out of it wearing sunglasses going "Dangerously hot, dwarvishly cheesey....."
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