I’d wandered out of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey last Christmas being slightly disappointed. I’d struggled to articulate why to my mates but in the weeks that followed I’d got to understand that I’d expected more of the LOTR feel. With Peter Jackson returning in place of Guillermo del Toro it was clear that we weren’t going to get a new vision of Middle Earth but more of what we’d come to expect. The first film, in what eventually has become a trilogy, had to lay a good bit of groundwork but in the Desolation of Smaug, things really get going. We know that the group comprising of Gandalf, Bilbo (“the burglar”) and our 14 dwarves are headed for the lonely mountain to reclaim the lost kingdom of Erebor from the titular dragon. I don’t really want to get into how the story plays out as it’ll contain spoilers but … There’s more →