We went to the movies Thursday night with Maria and our friends George Forss and the artist Donna Wynbrandt, we were driven back from the early show by a snowstorm but made it to a later showing. I’m nervous about walking on ice, but will happily risk lives to see a movie.

I was anxious to take George to this film,  I doubted Maria would like it but I thought George would love the “Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” George loves mysticism and myth – somebody who loves aliens would surely love J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy stories.

I think George did like it, he was knocked out by the fast-pace and some of the special effects,  Maria hated the movie and raged on about it for about 15 miles on the way home, and I was surprised to be disappointed by it also. It’s gotten good reviews and is a hit, but for me, Tolkien was reduced to yet another video-game bloodbath interspersed with gorgeous sets and scenes of New Zealand. Donna was non-committal, she is a dedicated Buddhist, I suspect she might have gotten uneasy when the 1,000th Orc was cut in half or be-headed or had his throat cut by some magic sword. (The orcs are the bad guys.)

Anything resembling a narrative thread was overwhelmed by endless waves of hapless Orcs – big, scary guys, thousands of them armed to the teeth and riding wild and roaring beasts, and what was really amazing was that they didn’t manage to kill a single dwarf in three hours of endless conflict, pursuit, threats, grunting and head-chopping. In fact, they didn’t manage to kill anybody, they did break some windows and scare some kids.

When the Orcs weren’t growling and grunting and messing up, there was the gathering of evil (quite literally a dark cloud) and then Smaug himself, an impressive looking dragon with great eyes,  but essentially a gasbag who traded insults with dwarves for nearly an hour instead of simply roasting them, which he had the opportunity to do a hundred times.

If you read any of Tolkien’s books you had a shot at comprehending what all these elements had to do with one another, in the movie you don’t have a chance. While Smaug is calling the dwarves names in dark and treasure-filled rooms – and they are calling him out as fat and old – Gandolf the Wizard seems to have gotten dementia, he pops in and out of the movie mumbling in incomprehensible wizard-speak about nothing I could understand and ends up hanging off the side of a mountain in a giant birdcage.

Smaug is the windiest monster I’ve seen in a long time, he belongs on the floor of the U.S. Senate where he can huff and puff all day and blow nobody’s house down.

I lost count, but it’s a conservative estimate that the dwarves survived about a thousand efforts to kill, drown, imprison, burn,  stab, club, (not to mention almost get eaten by giant spiders)  and maim them and another dozen or so rounds with the world’s most pompous dragon. After all of his slithering and threatening and droning on, Smaug was about as scary as a Macy’s Parade float. I found myself wanting to get up and shout, “hey, you’re a powerful dragon! Kill something, anything!)

The movie was beautiful at moments, always relentless, interrupting any semblance of a plot or the development of a human being or coherent narrative with constant roaring and netherworld-mumbo jumbo and rushing around by the incompetent Orcs. I kept thinking, none of the bad guys had a plan, they needed a plan.

I don’t know why I am continuously surprised by this trend in movies, it seems to be the formula to draw teenagers and Asians overseas into movie theaters. The rest of us come along like Pavlovian robots, oh-a-Tolkien-movie-how-cool-to-go-see-it. Not.

I am happy to have anybody succeed but sorry to see that Peter Jackson has sold out to the forces of darkness, turning Tolkien’s wonderful stories into yet another Marvel Comic or worse, another combat video game. Talk about surrendering to the forces of evil.  I hope Bilbo fares better than Jackson in the sequel, which I will not be seeing. If I won’t be at any more Hobbit movies, I would love to see New Zealand where the Hobbit movies have been filmed, it looks like a beautiful place.

I think George liked it a lot, though he seemed, like the rest of us, a tad overwhelmed by it. I guess the critics have given up on things like plot and narrative, perhaps it just doesn’t matter anymore. I am a big fan of dumb and loud movies, and also of many stupid ones(I have seen “Young Frankenstein” many times), but this one fell pretty far short for me. Bring some Ibuprofen, there is more growling in this movie than at any dozen animal shelters. I wonder if George would like “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

– Next up, “Wolf Of Wall Street,” Martin Scorcese and Leonardo DiCaprio team up for another three-hour movie about greed and power. I’ll let you know. I also want to see “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Her,” and “Saving Mr. Banks.”