Review: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Before reading, please be aware that this review contains SPOILERS for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. Though it won't be released in the US until December 17^th, it's been out for a couple of days in New Zealand (and a few other countries) so consider yourself warned. When I say there are MAJOR SPOILERS ahead, I'm not just winking at those who have read the books and know about the character deaths. This is about the film in its entirety.

So ... have you ever wanted to watch one hundred and forty-four minutes of CGI figurines fighting each other? Because that's pretty much this entire movie in a nutshell. It's very apparent at this stage why they abandoned the subtitle There And Back Again in favour of The Battle of the Five Armies, and it's because by this point any resemblance to Tolkien's modest little story (relatively speaking) has been obliterated. This is all about the spectacle.




At the conclusion of my review for The Desolation of Smaug, I pointed out what seemed a glaring problem in store for the trilogy's final instalment: it had run out of plot. The journey was over. The dwarves had reached the Lonely Mountain. All that remained was Smaug's death and the ensuing battle of the five armies. Though the appendixes were being diligently mined for new material, and the screen-writers had even gone so far as to add their own original character to the mix, for the most part there was nothing left to do but draw out a climax well beyond its breaking point.

There is – no exaggeration – at least a solid non-stop hour of relentless computer-animated action in this film. As a result, the story's pacing is sluggish, its humanity is lost, and even the tragic deaths feel rote.

This is the movie. The WHOLE movie. I'm not kidding.

If you wanted proof that The Hobbit should have been a single film (two at most), it can be found in the fact that Smaug is defeated in the cold opening.  He's dead no more than seven minutes in, after which everyone shrugs their shoulders and turns their attention to the Lonely Mountain. It's only then that "The Battle of the Five Armies" title pops up on the screen.

(Given this film's commitment to being utterly OTT, I'm surprised that they didn't go the whole hog and include Smaug in the battle, wantonly destroying all five armies as they attempted to bring him down while simultaneously fighting each other).

As it happens, Smaug's death is the high point of the film, simply because it manages to fuse the intensity of its bombastic special-effects with a very real and poignant degree of humanity: in this case, Bard using his own son's shoulder as an improvised bow in aiming the massive Black Arrow at Smaug's vulnerable scales, gently talking the terrified boy into a state of calm as he takes careful aim. It's a beautiful sequence that ensures the film hits its peak five minutes in.

He spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out
what they've done to Orlando Bloom's face.

Other moments of humanity are few and far between, though the closest they get is naturally Thorin's descent into "gold lust" and his obsession with the Arkenstone. Unfortunately, subtlety is bludgeoned to death with a brick in their depiction of this downwards spiral: Thorin goes full Macbeth, complete with slow-motion brooding as sound-bites of dialogue we've literally just heard a few seconds ago echo around him at the same time he hallucinates about being sucked into the golden floor of the throne room. Then he snaps out of it, just in time for the next round of battle going on outside.

As said battle rages on, things get increasingly ridiculous, with special appearances from:

1. A troll head-butting a wall and promptly knocking itself out
2. An entire army of Dwarves turning up at the Mountain one day after a missive for help goes out
3. Billy Connolly riding a pig
4. Lee Pace riding a moose
5. The sandworms from Dune, I shit you not
6. The weather on a rock outcropping going from normal to snowy/misty in the time it takes some Dwarves to climb up to it
7. Dwarves reaching said outcropping on the backs of large-horned goats that appear instantaneously and disappear just as abruptly
8. Legolas running up the masonry of a bridge as it's falling beneath his feet
9. The eagles turning up and throwing a giant bear into the battle (I guess it was Beorn, but nobody bothers to clarify the issue)

Look at that moose's face. It KNOWS how stupid it looks.

Oh, and they damseled Tauriel. They damseled Tauriel. I couldn't believe it. She goes to Kili's aid, gets pummelled by an orc, is saved by Kili, watches as the orc kills him, pulls a double-suicide manoeuvre by throwing herself and the orc off the cliff, gets knocked out, remains unconscious as it recovers and advances on her, and is subsequently saved by Legolas who ultimately kills the orc all by himself. I was sitting there in the theatre with my mouth open in disbelief.

Look, you've read my review for The Desolation of Smaug. I defended this character's inclusion. Tauriel was an original character who (romance aside) not only felt organic to the story but intrinsic to the plot, making decisions that informed the action and exemplifying some of the film's major themes.

Here? Apart from ushering Bard's children and a few dwarves out of Laketown, she's relegated to following the lads around (first on a pointless reconnaissance mission with Legolas, and then in chasing after Kili in a failed rescue attempt). Her arc is left completely up in the air. Seriously, what the hell happens to her? Is her exile lifted? Does she return to Mirkwood? Follow Legolas? Go west? Where is she throughout the entire duration of the War of the Ring?

And if you needed further proof that the paltry "love triangle" was an eleventh hour add-on by some clueless executive who thinks such things are so hot right now, all you need to know is that Kili dies, Tauriel cries, and Legolas rocks off to find Aragorn without even saying goodbye to the woman he's apparently been pining for all this movie and the last. I guess slash-fans will love the implications of that, but everyone else will wonder what the point of it all was and where the resolution is (possibly in the Extended Edition DVDs).

While we're on the subject of the film's female characters, it's a little disappointing that the task of delivering the Black Arrow into his father's hands was given to Bain instead of Sigrid (who gets nothing to do here but run from place to place), and even more disappointing that despite a scene of a Laketown woman rallying the others to help the men in battle, we never actually get to see them in action. Also, no dwarf women either.

Look, this film had no real moral obligation to include more female characters in a book that had none, but since they went out of their way to include more women anyway, it seems odd that they didn't take any of the obvious opportunities to utilize them better.

Instead there is an inordinate amount of time spent on Alfrid (Ryan Gage, perhaps better known as King Louis on The Musketeers), a slimy and greasy-looking underling of the Master of Laketown, who seems to have no real purpose beyond being contentious and trying to save himself in increasingly selfish ways. I kept waiting for him to either a) stab someone in the back, leading to a well-deserved comeuppance, or b) finally show some mettle and redeem himself somehow. Since neither happened, I'm at a loss to explain why he was in this film at all.

And just to round things up, even Galadriel's big scene at Dol Guldur was a little anti-climactic. Remember how everyone's least favourite part of The Fellowship was that weird transformation when Galadriel goes radioactive and shouts: "insteadofadarklordyoushallhavea QUEEEEEEEEEEEN!" and throws her hands in the air? Well, it's back and now she looks like Samara from The Ring.

Hey, maybe that's fitting. Rings, right?

As such, Saruman, Elrond and Radagast only have what amounts to walk-on cameos, presumably to justify their inclusion in the array of Alan Lee portraits that accompany their names in the closing credits (as he did for the cast at the end of The Return of the King).

I don't know what else to say. There's every chance that time and a rewatch will alleviate some of the problems I had with The Battle of the Five Armies, though I don't really feel much incentive to see it again – not as much as its two predecessors, and CERTAINLY not as much as the original trilogy. This left me exhausted and disconnected, and though I had no deep emotional investment in the prequels, I'm a little sad that the entirety of The Lord of the Rings franchise and its relationship with New Zealand, the film industry, and its world-wide audience has ended in such a wonky manner.

Miscellaneous Observations:

None of the three major deaths made me cry, or even very emotional. There was just too much going on in regard to spectacle and noise and Jackson trying to "out-epic" himself at every turn. To add insult to injury, a grave oversight was that there was never any "cool down" period in regards to the deaths, in which the bodies are laid to rest and the living allowed to pay their respects.

Even they're side-eying this movie's questionable decisions.

The Arkenstone is last seen going into Bard's pocket prior to battle and is never mentioned again. Likewise, there's no explanation of who becomes the next King Under the Mountain.

There is an interesting rapport between Tauriel and Thranduil, one that will no doubt be ignored by fandom in favour of Thorin/Thranduil slash (which seems to be spurred on by Richard Armitage/Lee Pace hanging out behind the scenes – did fandom learn nothing from the Elijah Woods/Dominic Monaghan tin-hatting debacle of ten years ago?) but which includes a charged confrontation scene between the two of them that's later assuaged in the film's final act in which Thranduil tries to provide her with her some measure of condolence.

I'm not talking about shipping them by any means, but it's ironic that for all the attempts to romantically link Tauriel with Legolas and/or Kili, it's with her king/quasi-father figure that she has her most intriguing connection.

The film ends with Ian Holm's aged Bilbo pondering the Ring in the moments before Gandalf knocks on the door at the start of The Fellowship, complete with dialogue lifted straight from that film (only shown through Bilbo's eyes). Which means I had to laugh when it audibly fades out just before Gandalf gets to the line: "You haven't aged a day."

And since I namedropped Macbeth earlier, I may as well go out with one of his quotes that (for better or worse) sums up this film nicely:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.