The Hobbit: The Battle
of the Five Armies is easily the weakest of its trilogy, and by far the
worst of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies. It’s all climax, an endless
battle that does nothing that couldn’t have been accomplished with an extra
fifteen or twenty minutes in the last one. And yet, this is likely the last
time we’ll get to visit Tolkien’s fantasy world through Jackson’s eyes. For
those of us who’ve liked that feeling, it’s bittersweet to see it go. That it’s
not as rousing and wistful as the first finale, eleven years ago with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King, is almost beside the point. It’s one more chance to go there and back
again, to see these landscapes and creatures, marvel at the prodigious
attention to detail, and hear the strains of Howard Shore’s melodies, a feat of
film scoring nearing John Williams’ Star
Wars work for its web of themes. In other words, it’s worth seeing for
those who’ve already made it this far.
So maybe it’s helpful to think of Battle of the Five Armies less as a self-contained movie, more as a
way for Jackson to create this place on the big screen for the last time. It’s
a bestiary: Hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs, horses, elk, giants, wizards, goblins,
evil spirits, war bats, giant eagles, bears, a dragon, and more. It’s a map: CGI
armies marched around a game board battlefield. It’s an armory: swords,
shields, helmets, hammers, clubs, battering rams, bow and arrow. It’s a drawn
out conclusion from a creator who doesn’t want to let this story go, who wants
to linger in Middle Earth for just five more minutes, then five more, then
more. Good thing, then, that Jackson’s skilled with whipping up blockbuster
spectacle, splashing his vivid visuals across the wide screen in ceaseless
fantastical imagery so big it betrays how small the thinking is of so many of
our tentpole directors. Sure, he’s a filmmaker who errs on the side of too much
of a good thing – endless stalemates, overdone comic relief – but so be it.
This last Hobbit picture
picks up right where the last left off, with the dragon Smaug (Benedict
Cumberbatch) emerging from his mountain lair, flying angrily toward the nearest
village and leaving his vast stockpiles of gold unattended. In the mountain are
the dwarves (led by Richard Armitage), who have a historical claim to the site,
and Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the Hobbit who helped them get there.
Eventually, the riches are the target of attack by an army of men (led by Luke
Evans) and an army of elves (Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, and Evangeline Lilly among
them) who want their fair share. The army of orcs right behind them just wants
to kill a bunch of people for some reason. I know that’s only three armies, four
when you count the dwarves reinforcements, but I must confess I’m not exactly
sure how the title’s math works out here.
For the first half of the movie, those computer-animated
armies line up behind character actors as everyone argues about who gets the
gold and how the fighting’s going to start. Then, the fighting starts, and the
armies collide repeatedly in anonymous garbles of digital noise across rocks
and fields, up and down the sides of cliffs, and across an icy lagoon. We dip
into personal conflicts between recognizable orcs and our big heroes, follow
the king of the dwarves and his battle with curse-induced greed, and check in
with Gandalf (Ian McKellen) who has important Lord of the Rings foreshadowing to take care of before joining the
main battle. Some moments of combat are nicely done – the bit with ice is
clever, as is a neat trick involving an elk – but it grows awfully repetitive.
You can almost hear the small material as it’s stretched thin to fill time.
The film loses the emotional thread, and its central
narrative momentum along with it, as it gets tangled up in the clanging swords,
stabbing and bludgeoning. But when the camera comes to rest on Bilbo Baggins, with Freeman's performance as good as always, the film finds its center. He’s taken aback by the developments, is ready to help his
friends even when they disagree with his strategy, and bravely stands in the
thick of it even when danger is great. When it’s all over, he is happy to have
had this experience and even happier to go home. And so Five Armies brings him there, eventually. It wraps up dangling plot
threads, resolves its cliffhangers, and joins up with the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring quite nicely.
Along the way we have to slog through some colossally uninvolving battle
business, but Jackson brings it home, to the Shire and the Hobbits, the coziest
corner of Middle Earth, safe and sound. He asks your indulgence, tries your
patience, but eventually delivers some small rewards.
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