Our Reluctant Hero Goes Back into the Dark

The Hobbit never grabbed me the way it grabbed everyone else. I sat through the first film more out of obligation than desire, following Bilbo Baggins—our unusual, overfed, deeply reluctant hero—through cave systems and goblin hordes while Peter Jackson stretched a slim children’s book to its absolute limit. And yet there was something I couldn’t entirely dismiss: a coziness at the edges of all that bombast, a world that felt inhabited rather than merely rendered.

The second trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug got under my skin in a way I wasn’t expecting. Smaug himself, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch beneath layers of processing that make him sound like something between a reptile and a collapsing building, is the main draw. The dragon coiled around his mountain of gold, one enormous eye sliding open in the dark. That image alone was enough to get me back in a cinema seat.

I’m not a Lord of the Rings person. Never have been. But the Hobbit operates in a different register—more fairy tale, less apocalypse, stakes that feel personal rather than cosmological—and I find it easier to inhabit. The weight of the world isn’t in Bilbo’s pack the way it sits in Frodo’s. He’s just a small creature in way over his head. I know that feeling.