Movie Review: ‘The Desolation of Smaug’

“The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” is a middle installment in a trilogy, but viewers aren’t pitched into the middle of the action. As always, director Peter Jackson eases viewers in with a flashback to this movie released on DVD April 8. “The Desolation of Smaug” covers six chapters of the book, but Jackson did not leave the story as is. He incorporated material from the appendices and J.R.R. Tolkien’s history of Middle-Earth, “The Silmarillion,” to explain elements of the ...