I really like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. (DoS) That, however, is not the subject
this post. This post means to react to the strange backlash to the film’s
“Golden Statue climax”. To summarize – in the final chapter of DoS the dwarves of Erebor return home
and face off against the fearsome dragon that took over their kingdom. They
hatch a plan. First, they trick Smaug into using his fire to reignite the great
furnaces of Erebor. Then they lead Smaug to a central chamber, where they
unleash a large mold of a Dwarf. As the mold falls off, it is revealed that it
has been filled with gold, resulting a Giant Golden Dwarf Statue. Smaug is
mesmerized by the sight of it.
He approaches what seems to be his
new, beautiful treasure – only for the Statue to start melting, covering him in
Gold from head to toe. Thorin and Bilbo seem relieved – the plan has worked.
But then Smaug bursts from the gold, brushes off the coating and flies off to
decimate Lake Town. Putting aside the fact that Smaug’s decision to destroy
Lake Town is not very convincing, I found the climax to be mostly successful.
It was thrilling, entertaining and a good final set piece. A lot of people, however,
take issue with this climax.
Chief complaints are:
1. Smaug’s credibility is severely
undermined, as he never manages to bring down any of the dwarves and his keen
sense of smell is non-existent.
2. The sequence, which includes a
lot of death-defying bits of action, repeatedly defies the laws of physics. Eg.
Smaug’s fire doesn’t burn the dwarves, Thorin is able to use a wheelbarrow to
swim through molten lava, gold seems to melt too quickly or not quickly enough.
3. The Dwarves’ plan is
meaningless/stupid, as the dwarves should know that Smaug is impervious to
heat. Why would they try to burn him?
The last point seems to especially
raise a lot of ire. Having spoken to at least one Tolkien scholar and read a
number of comments, I was surprised to learn that apparently many people
believed that the Dwarves were intending to immolate Smaug, a point that really
put them off from the film. The
Huffington Post, for instance, lists it as one of the top five preposterous
events in the film. Per Seth Abramson:
“1a. That giant statue of molten
gold. During what has been referred
to in The Atlantic as the dwarves' "MacGyveresque" battle
with Smaug -- a term which, incredibly, makes it sound more plausible than it
was -- Thorin's final gambit involves drowning Smaug in a lake of molten gold.
Putting aside that Thorin knows, as we
all know, that dragons already have inside of them a substance as hot as molten
gold, making immolating a dragon with molten gold an impossibility, does
anyone know why the massive dwarven totem Thorin stands atop during this
desperate attack is filled with molten gold in the first place? And -- moreover
-- molten gold that comes out if you just pull a couple chains really hard?
Sure, the dwarves had just lit the forges of Erebor -- itself an unlikely feat
under the circumstances, especially in the time allotted for it -- but are we
really to believe that the second the forges are fired up, elsewhere in the
dwarven stronghold a fifty-foot high statue of a dwarven king instantly
explodes, presumably killing everyone standing anywhere near it?”
His comments are echoed by scholar
Kristin Thompson, author of The Frodo
Franchise:
“There is so much in the sequence
of the Dwarves’ attempt to kill Smaug that is distractingly implausible. Just
as the lengthy falls in the Goblintown scene of Journey never seemed to
cause so much as a broken bone, in Smaug’s domain the dragon breathes great
sheets of fire repeatedly and never seems to singe the Dwarves. When Thorin’s
jacket is set afire, he simply takes it off and keeps running.
How could this vast quantity of
gold be melted so quickly? How could Thorin ride a river of molten gold in a
metal wheelbarrow and survive? Why does the giant Dwarf king’s statue, when the
mold is pulled away, stand for several seconds as Smaug admires it before
suddenly gushing into a golden lake that momentarily overwhelms the dragon? And why, if Dwarves know so much about
dragons, does it not occur to them that a creature full of fire couldn’t be
killed in this fashion? Why would Smaug keep bashing down columns and other
parts of the “building” which he considers his and where he plays to spend the
rest of his life?”
I agree with the notion that
Smaug’s credibility is undermined. Jackson and co. obviously couldn’t go so
far, as to actually have Smaug kill anybody, as that would stray too far away
from the source text. But all the other
complaints I find utterly ridiculous.
For instance, why are people
questioning how long it would take to melt and fill a golden statue?
Given that the story takes place in
a fantasy scenario, I see no reason as to complain about the fact that melting
gold takes considerably less time and effort than it would in the real
world.
Obviously, the process of filling
the mold had begun as soon as the forges were ready. Thus, all the time Smaug
had spent chasing the Dwarves after igniting the furnaces had been used to fill
the mold with the molten gold. For comparison, it takes Khal Drogo a couple of
minutes to meld gold medallions into liquid form in A Game of Thrones, which he boils in a pot made for soup. Or what about the T-1000 Terminator from T2, who
somehow turns from a liquid metal state to a solid state in mere seconds?
And why are people complaining
about the realism of dragon fire all of a sudden? Gandalf the Grey never
burned, despite experiencing the fire of the Balrog up close in LOTR. Neither
did Frodo and Sam, despite being surrounded by hot lava in the climax of ROTK.
All this brings me to the Dwarves’
plan. Because the Dwarves never really explain their plan to the audience,
there’s a common misperception that
the dwarves were trying to foolishly immolate Smaug. This couldn’t be further
from the truth – the Dwarves were trying to drown him in the molten
gold, which would’ve led him to die from asphyxiation, had it worked. When you
think about it, it’s a logical solution to the Dragon problem. Smaug may be
virtually invincible, but he does need to
breathe --- so, why not cover him in
a liquid head to toe that would suffocate him and act as a form of poetic
justice?
For those that assert the Dwarves
were going for immolation, I would say that there is plenty of against this. For
one thing, it’s safe to assume that Jackson, Boyens and Walsh are well aware of
the fact that Smaug is impervious to heat and wouldn’t have implemented the
Golden Statue method in the film, unless it actually had a chance of
succeeding. For another, after Smaug is covered, the camera lingers on a shot
of the immobile golden liquid in the great hall – the shot intentionally shows
no bubbles rising to the surface, suggesting Smaug has suffocated.
But most telling is the fact that
climax of Smaug is actually based on or
inspired by the climax from another film altogether – namely, Alien 3.
In that film, the action took place
in a prison, where an Alien runs amok, gradually killing off the inmates. Having
no weapons capable of killing the beast, heroine Ellen Ripley and the inmates form
a plan to lure the alien into their furnace area by using themselves as bait,
where they can drown it in molten lead. (This is directly
spelled out in the film.)
The plan appears to succeed –
Ripley pours the lead, covering it from head to toe. But the creature bursts
out of it, angry but alive. Smaug’s emergence from the molten gold directly mirrors
the alien’s escape from the lead. In both cases we have a scenario, where the
main characters try to kill an unstoppable, man-eating beast by luring it into
a molding facility and covering it in molten metal. The similarities between these scenarios are
too numerous to be simply coincidental. So, in short, the Dwarves were trying
to drown Smaug, not immolate him.
Obviously, the writers could’ve
explained this point better. One can imagine the Dwarves conversing and stating
something to the effect of: “The worm loves gold, so let’s drown him in it!”
But I doubt anyone on the Hobbit writing
team thought that the audience would need this detail explicitly spelled out. This
post obviously won’t address everyone’s issues with The Hobbit trilogy or the climax of DoS, but I believe it should be enough to retire the “Why did the
Dwarves try to burn Smaug?” question.
