God bless Peter Jackson. He has a good heart and he clearly loves making movies. Nothing shows his love for this craft more than The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. It’s a film packed to near bursting with thrilling sights, passioned monologues and epic moments. Sad to say it has more in common with Dungeons and Dragons, a derivative version of Middle Earth, than it does with Tolkien’s original classic.
But wait, let me take a little of that back. Of the three Hobbit films, The Battle of the Five Armies is perhaps the most faithful to Tolkien’s original work, or, to phrase that better, the least mislead. Sure there are huge additions and striking omissions, but overall we kind of get the last couple chapters in there. Smaug is killed, Lake-town is destroyed, and the forces of men, dwarves, elves and goblins converge to wage war. We also get a little glimpse at the White Council’s raid on Dol Guldur, an unnecessary but interesting side plot. Is there a ton of unnecessary action? Yes. Is that action well choreographed and exciting? I hate to admit it, but also yes. My brother Peter phrased it best after emerging from the darkness of the theater: “This film has rekindled my 2003 desire to kill orcs.” There are some really stunning fight sequences in this film, and even though they rely heavily on CG, they work. Really well in fact.
We also get a some nice character development from Bilbo and Thorin, as Bilbo becomes a little more daring and a little wiser, and Thorin is tragically doomed by his desire for wealth. One of the things I always enjoyed about Tolkien’s book is how honest and almost cynical it is about the greed of men. Even the noblest of characters are willing to slaughter each other for gold, and only the homespun selflessness of Bilbo saves them from themselves. Peter Jackson spoils this theme by inflating it to ridiculous heights. Instead of Thorin just getting a bit too greedy, Jackson insinuates that the treasure in the mountain is somehow cursed like the ring in the Lord of the Rings trilogy is cursed, and that it’s slowly perverting Thorin. Too bad Gandalf didn’t take this into consideration when he sent the dwarves to recover it. This part of the film makes no sense and is frankly ridiculous.
This leads me to the main problem with The Battle of the Five Armies, and the Hobbit films in general: they’re less movies than footnotes for The Lord of The Rings Trilogy. Jackson seems to be riffing on ideas from his other films rather than creating new ones, which makes for some very unbelievable and unsatisfying sequences. Remember how Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli efficiently cut down countless orcs in The Fellowship of the Ring? Well the Dwarves and Bilbo do that too, though there’s nothing in these films to indicate that they’re in any way as skilled as those three were. Remember how the Rohan soldiers bravely defended Helm’s Deep from wave upon wave or Uruk-hai in The Two Towers? Well, the men and women of Lake-town do that too, even though they’re just townsfolk, whereas the Rohan were all hardened soldiers. Remember how Legolas did ridiculous stunts? Well…um…he still does. And they’re still kind of stupidly laugh-out-loud awesome.
This blunt, shorthand style of filmmaking isn’t new to Peter Jackson. He’s no master of subtlety, and even in the original Lord of the Rings films characters barked stereotypical lines and did ridiculously epic things. But these unrealistic, purely cinematic moments felt earned; in the Hobbit films they just feel tacked on. We had to watch Aragorn slog through the wilds before he led armies. Bard just magically becomes an Aragorn doppelgänger overnight.
What are we left with then? A very flawed trilogy with some surprisingly artful moments. An Unexpected Journey gave us magical dwarf song wafting up through the moonlight, The Desolation of Smaug gave us splendid visions of elven castles and dragons and spiders just as wonderful as my father made them sound reading to me as a kid, and The Battle of the Five Armies, though at times ramping to ridiculous levels of testosterone and video game-like action, gives us a surprisingly faithful ending, wrapping up as abruptly and as simply as the book did. It’s almost as if Jackson, reading all of the complaints about the multiple endings in his Return of The King, said “you want a simple ending? I’ll give you a simple ending!” There’s a moment in all the digital chaos where the booming music and clanging sound effect fade out, the last of the raging battle is viewed from a distance, and we’re left with a small group of characters standing alone on a mountain. Surprisingly we don’t cut back to the last dregs of the battle or the myriad soldiers below. The film becomes small and stays small, focusing on the remaining dwarves saying their tearful farewells and Bilbo and Galdalf as they make their peaceful way home, just like the book did. For all the bad bits, Jackson ended this second trilogy well. Bless him. I can’t wait to see what cinematic wizardry he conjures up next!
