HOBBIT WEEK: The Battle of the Five Armies

Welcome back to Hobbit Week! Since yesterday and the day before, our beloved N. Demmy has been reviewing Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy, telling you what he thought of it, if it was any good, etc. We hope you enjoy his final review today as he brings an end to his journey there and back again. Get ready, ’cause we’re going on one last adventure!

–The Editor

Directed by Peter Jackson.

Written by Peter Jackson, Philipa Boyens, Fran Walsh and Guillermo del Toro.

Starring Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Luke Evans, Evangeline Lily, Orlando Bloom, Lee Pace, Manu Bennet, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Chrisopher Lee and Benedict Cumberbatch.

PG-13, 144 minutes.

Lame title notwithstanding, The Battle of the Five Armies makes a horrible first impression. Throwing viewers headlong into the tail end of an action scene with no warning, only those who took the time to watch the The Desolation of Smaug immediately beforehand will be able to make out what’s going on. While it’s not unheard of to begin a movie with an action sequence, it’s incredibly jarring to begin at the climax of one begun in a previous movie. In fact, that’s the first feeling with which one can sum up The Hobbit finale. It’s jarring until it becomes a bore, then things pick up in the middle but it goes too far and ends up feeling like a test of your endurance.

The story picks up with the dragon, Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch), attacking the downtrodden village of men on the lake. In the aftermath of this siege, several armies of Middle-earth converge on the mountain in order to stake their claim to the considerable treasure hoard within.

Battle follows in the footsteps of the second movie in that, despite a still considerable length of time spent in the theater, it never feels like we’re watching a complete movie. The especially wonky pacing doesn’t help matters, either. After the misguided opening scenes, the rest of the movie is essentially one huge action scene, not to mention all the build-up to it. Lost in the shuffle of big heroics and some less-than-compelling plot detours (dragon sickness? Giant, earth-eating worms?) is our title character, the hobbit himself.

This is the biggest problem with these movies in general. While I still contend that An Unexpected Journey does a solid job of keeping the focus on Bilbo Baggins, this last one almost renders him inconsequential to everything that’s going on. He does a few important things, but at times it feels like the movie is doing its damnedest to keep him off-screen so we can focus the lion’s share of time on mano-a-mano showdowns, whether it be between Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and the CGI orc with spikes coming out of his skin or Thorin (Richard Armitage) against Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennet). If that’s not going on, we are given drawn-out conclusions to the forced love triangle between Tauriel the elf (Evangeline Lily), Kili the dwarf (Aidan Turner) and Legolas. Most egregious is the so-called comedic stylings of a lackey character introduced in the second movie, who reappears at a consistently alarming rate throughout the film. We spend so little time with the hobbit in this finale that the bonkers, balls-to-the-wall battle sequences feel more like pedestrian exercises in spectacle than a gentle soul’s observation of the fundamentally bizarre chain of events around him.

Not willing to replicate the protracted and emotional epilogue scenes of The Return of the King, The Battle of the Five Armies closes the book on Tolkien film adaptations with a weary shrug. It’s fitting in the sense that movie seemingly exhausts itself into the end credits, but it hardly leaves a lasting impression. It’s shorter than the first two movies but it feels longer, which can probably be chalked up to the fact that, similar to how the climax of an action scene was carried into this movie, the climax of the story as a whole populates the running time. It was up to The Battle of the Five Armies to truly vindicate the filmmakers decision to make this relatively small story into three epic movies. In the end, as much as I enjoyed and anticipated each of these movies during their respective releases, it might have been better to keep the whole enterprise at two leaner movies, as initially planned, or even one big streamlined adventure.

That’s it for Hobbit Week! If you enjoyed N. Demmy’s battle of the five armies, you can find his latest work right HERE and his earlier articles and reviews over HERE.

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