THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF FIVE ARMIES

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies

Grade: B+

Directed by Peter Jackson

STARRING: Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Sir Ian McKellen, Luke Evans, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, and Aidan Turner; Also FEATURING Manu Bennett as Azog (the Pale Orc), Ryan Gage as Alfrid, Dean O’Gorman as Fili, Ken Stott as Balin, Graham McTavish as Dwalin, Lawrence Makoare as Bolg, and Billy Connolly as Dain Ironfoot; WITH Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Christopher Lee as Saruman, Hugo Weaving as Elrond, Ian Holm as Older Bilbo, and Benedict Cumberbatch as the voice of Smaug and the voice of Sauron
PREMISE: After the dragon Smaug abandons his treasure horde, armies of dwarves, men, orcs and elves descend on The Lonely Mountain, each ready to fight to the death for the old fortress and the gold within.

Rated PG-13 for strong violence and intense action (including several decapitations), scary moments, some emotional content, and brief language

Let’s get this out of the way: neither this movie nor its predecessors (2013’s The Desolation of Smaug and 2012’s The Unexpected Journey) has anything on the Lord of the Rings films that were released in 2001, 2002, and 2003. All derived from J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit or There And Back Again’, originally published in 1937, the Hobbit films—though created and directed by the same team that made that truly epic, wonderful trilogy—flounder in comparison with those movies. They may have been enough to satisfy and intrigue fans of the LOTR movies, and, to a lesser extent, fans of Tolkien’s Middle Earth universe, but they still fell far short of the Rings films in terms of scope, character development, emotional depth, and, surprisingly, convincing visual effects. There’s no contest (even without considering that the Rings films combined to win 15 Oscars while the Hobbit flicks have barely even been nominated), and you should know that the person writing this is a lifelong die-hard fan of ‘The Hobbit’ book.

Was it a little presumptuous, over-the-top and flat-out mercenary for Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson and company to make three epic-length movies out of the barely-200-page ‘Hobbit’ book? Yes. Were the movies total crap? Absolutely not. And, though I could, personally, talk ‘till I was blue in the face about the things the movies included that weren’t in the book and details they changed and how much they clearly stretched out these movies, I’ll gladly re-watch them. The Battle of Five Armies, the final film in the Hobbit series, may not be the most faithful to the book but is probably the best and most entertaining of the three movies. It’s shorter on boring exposition than its predecessors, it has considerably more action, and it brings together all the most important human, hobbit, dwarf, wizard and elf characters that have been running around separately for most of the series so far. It struggles a bit to fill even a 144-minute running time (by far the shortest in the Hobbit or Rings series) with interesting content, but it ultimately delivers the action goods, and brings the story full circle to the point that it ends with a pleasant little re-doing of one of the early scenes from 2001’s Fellowship of the Ring. Die-hards fans of the book will have a cow, but this is a solid film that almost makes you regret that this is the end, at least for the foreseeable future, of cinematic adventures in Middle Earth.

Plot

**SPOILER ALERT: If you have not read the book, you are encouraged to at least skip this ‘Plot’ section to avoid learning key elements of this film. Also, people wanting to see ‘Battle of the Five Armies’ are strongly encouraged to watch the first two ‘Hobbit’ films if they have not yet seen them, as this installment starts within minutes of the end of ‘The Desolation of Smaug’.**

Infuriated by the trespassing dwarves in his cave, the dragon Smaug attacks Esgaroth—also known as Laketown—for giving the dwarves shelter and food and the means to come to the Lonely Mountain’s shores. Though hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his dwarf companions can only watch helplessly as the dragon rains fire and destruction on the town, all is not lost. Courageous Bard (Luke Evans) manages to kill the dragon with a one-in-a-million arrow shot and then lead the survivors of Laketown’s wreckage to safety. There, the people hail Bard as their savior and leader, and look to him for direction. With many wounded, no homes, and little food, things soon look bleak for the survivors until assistance miraculously arrives from the nearby kingdom of Wood Elves. With carts of food and drink and medicine, the elven king Thrandruil (Lee Pace) immediately wins the people’s hearts and their assistance, if necessary, as he looks to the now dragon-free Lonely Mountain, which everyone knows has lower halls full to bursting with gold. In fact, Thrandruil has a highly-trained army of elves ready to chase Bilbo and the dwarves out of the halls—or kill them—if they don’t comply with his demands.

His demands concern some of the many gems and treasures that have, in the lieu of the dragon, passed into the ownership of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne of Erebor, the dwarf kingdom that thrived in the mountain before the dragon plundered it decades before. Now officially a king with a kingdom, Thorin appears increasingly power-mad and unlikely to negotiate with, or yield to, requests for assistance from the homeless Lake-men or demands for treasure from the elves. Even the return of wise wizard Gandalf the Grey (Sir Ian McKellen) can’t sway Thorin, who has become so power-mad and gold-obsessed he appears ready to turn on his own dwarves for the slightest sign of disagreement or sedition. Bilbo and Gandalf try to negotiate a truce between the two sides while Thorin sends messenger ravens requesting reinforcements from a nearby dwarf kingdom run by his cousin, but none of them know that an even more terrible adversary is swiftly approaching. Azog, the Pale Orc (Manu Bennett) and his merciless henchman Bolg (Lawrence Makoare), driven by the spirit of the ancient warlord Sauron, are hellbent on turning the mountain fortress into an outpost of darkness, and they’ve raised several huge armies of orcs and trolls to crush help crush any foes that might stand in their way.

What Works?

Let’s be honest here: what would you rather see—the explanation of how the story started, the middle section where nothing really gets accomplished, or the one where an angry dragon attacks a city and then all the main characters fight each other? Me, too. So, with all hands on deck and little plot to explain, The Battle of Five Armies is inherently more interesting than the previous films. It sure cracks along, early—the first half is probably the best the Hobbit movies have been so far, revisiting all the major characters and watching as Gandalf, Thrandruil and Bard debate the necessity of war over the gold, and while Bilbo and the dwarves look on helplessly as Thorin becomes a dark shadow of the noble dwarf he once was. And then, of course, the action starts, with men, dwarves and elves fighting huge armies of orcs and trolls. This epic cocktail of multi-faceted conflicts, engaging dialogue and characters of different races bickering and/or becoming allies against even nastier opponents is a pleasant reminder of what made the Rings films so rich and fulfilling. Also, most of it is taken straight out of Tolkien’s text; it’s rather unsurprising that this movie, like its predecessors, is at its best when it’s not trying to simply be a plug for the more popular Rings films but, rather, hearkens back to the true style and tone of its source material.

While this cast still pales in comparison to the larger ensemble that riveted and touched moviegoers throughout the three three-hour Rings films in the early years of the century, the Hobbit group at least gives audiences enough individuals with some amount of intrigue or relatability that we care where they are and what happens to them during the course of these massive battles. As the titular hairy-footed Shire-dweller, Martin Freeman proves what a fine actor he is, and what a shame it is that these movies (which ought to have been almost exclusively focused on him) became more ensemble pics that pushed Bilbo into the background. His final scenes here made me believe he really was the perfect actor for this part. Also impressing were Richard Armitage (in his meatiest go-round yet in the plumb role of haughty Thorin Oakenshield) and Luke Evans (in a beefed-up, charismatic role as the leader of the human fighters in the story); both showing nobility, guile and battlefield know-how, these two came the closest to re-capturing the inherent greatness of the Rings protagonists played by the likes of Viggo Mortensen. And as the primary elf characters (two of whom are not in the ‘Hobbit’ story at all), Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly and Lee Pace managed to bring some personality and depth to what were largely expert ass-kickers with great hair.

What Doesn’t Work?

I would be willing to bet that The Battle of Five Armies chronicles, at most, 40 pages of Tolkien’s book. This movie’s not as bloated as it could be (and, as mentioned, it’s not as long as the previous chapters), but, it still needs to be said that most of the movie is centered around bringing to life a conflict that was mentioned but largely skimmed-over in Tolkien’s text (‘The Hobbit’ was meant to be a children’s story, after all). So it’s almost impossible for the movie to not feel unnecessarily long when it tries to dramatize every twist of a massive battle, particularly in mano-a-mano fights between important good guys and important bad guys that go on for so long they start to feel like ‘boss battles’ in a video game. This overblown misguidance particularly applies to Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, who was an effectively-cool warrior in the Rings films, but, in this Hobbit series, has been given the instincts and agility of Spiderman and the healing/bounce back tendencies of X-Men’s Wolverine. Most of his fights go from engaging and cool to absurd and corny within seconds.

An Unexpected Journey, the first of these Hobbit movies, came out in 2012, nine years after The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. In the years between, we’ve seen visual effects enable cinematic depictions of almost everything, including “un-filmable” works like Life of Pi. Yet, somehow, the visual effects in The Hobbit fall far short of those in the Rings films, to the point that even the massive battle depicted in this installment feels fake and kinda boring—which is the exact opposite how the climactic battle in The Return of the King felt. Here, CGI trumps real figures, so most of the fights take on the depth and grit of a video game, where, in the old films, it never seemed doubtful that Viggo Mortensen, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, Miranda Otto and the others were fighting real beings. Thus, despite being about a massive battle, Five Armies has many a moment where it’s actually not all that exciting. There are many video games one could play if they wanted to see armies of computerized beings having at each other. Even with action aside, these Hobbit films felt drenched in computerized animation (and, thus, lacked realism) in a way that the earlier trilogy did not.

There are a few other little touches I feel compelled to mention that chip away at Five Armies’ credibility, like way-too-purposeful close-ups, glaringly-obvious music cues (Peter Jackson and co. must love that ‘hobbit theme’ music, because they use it at every possible opportunity) and lame attempts at occasional humor.

Content

There’s a whole lot of fighting, but, as usual, not many drops of spilled blood. A number of computerized beings do lose their heads, but these shots are not lingered upon (Game of Thrones, this isn’t). There are also a few darker scenes involving dark spirits and dark beings that harken back to the earlier movie’s occasional “Gothic horror” tone that could unsettle younger viewers.

Bottom Line

Like its predecessors, it can’t touch The Lord of the Rings movies for overall quality, engaging characters, or even awesome action, but The Battle of Five Armies might just be the best of the Hobbit movies. At just under two-and-a-half hours, it doesn’t feel unreasonably long, it gets the main cast of all three movies together to do some bickering, bantering, and orc-slaying, and the movie ends with 15 minutes that are pure Tolkien, almost straight out of the book. The exposition’s down, the action’s up, and it ends with a tidy little nod to The Fellowship of the Ring that die-hards will love. That’s good enough for me. J

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies (2014)

Directed by Peter Jackson

Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson

Based on the novel ‘The Hobbit’ by J.R.R. Tolkien
Rated PG-13
Length: 144 minutes