The Hobbit: The perils of middle passage Dir: Peter Jackson; Starring: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Benedict Cumberbatch, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry. The journey is, as you might expect, not without its perils. In fact, it is almost solid peril, with scarcely pause for rest or victuals before some fresh assault upon life and limb. The little band is, variously, wrapped up in giant spider-webs, attacked by Orcs, imprisoned by elves, and blasted by dragon's fiery breath. Indeed, one often has the impression that the Orcs are on speed-dial. The result is that suspense becomes almost routine: characters are forever falling through the air, into rushing water, or dangling from flinty outcrops, and yet - such elastic, sturdy little beings they are - they rarely seem to come a cropper. And if any possession should be of paramount importance - such as the ring that Bilbo took from Gollum, or a crucial key - it is guaranteed to slip through the hobbit's butter-fingers, and roll to a risky place from which it must be retrieved. Aside from a brief flashback at the start, in which Gandalf the Wizard (Ian McKellen) and Thorin (Richard Armitage) discuss the coming quest over a middle-earth ploughman's lunch, the action proceeds in straightforward fashion with plenty of jumpiness but few real surprises. It's a long run-up to the dragon's den (partly because of Jackson's decision to split a single book into three separate films), but the action is padded out with fresh elvish narratives. Not least the introduction of Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a pulchritudinous elf-warrior who falls for the handsome dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), much to the chagrin of elf prince Legolas (Orlando Bloom). The relationship between Tolkien and British rock music is an interesting one, and the custard-haired male elves have a strikingly roadie-for-Marillion look. Tauriel, meanwhile, provokes a bit of saucy dialogue that would surely have had Tolkien choking on his real ale, when Kili teasingly demands she search him thoroughly while taking him captive: "I might have something hidden in my trousers." Let us not go further: only bad puns await. Yet, the world so painstakingly evoked is a powerful, pungent one - so crammed with visual detail and awe-inspiring spectacle that it frequently overwhelms criticism of plot or dialogue. One becomes immersed in its visions: a paralysing forest, a steep stone stair-case in a mountainside, a bear that transforms into a gigantic man. Baggins stoically leads the audience through it, a hairy-footed Everyman who is not a man at all, but still full of human courage and subject to human temptations, feeling the dangerous whisper of power through the gold ring in his pocket. If I were 12 years old and expected nothing more of a film than it simply reveal to me a world that even a seething adolescent imagination might struggle to construct, to watch The Desolation of Smaug would be to step into cinematic heaven.