The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (***)

Directed by: Peter Jackson

Starring: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Benedict Cumberbatch, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lily, Luke Evans, Lee Pace, Graham McTavish, Ken Stott, Aidan Turner, Dean O’Gorman, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Christopher Lee, Sylvester McCoy, Manu Bennett, John Tui, Billy Connolly, Stephen Fry, Ryan Gage

Seen: December 13^th 2014

*** Out of ****

To me The Desolation of Smaug, my favourite of the Hobbit trilogy, was a bit better than The Two Towers, my least favourite (but still fantastic) of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. To me the Battle of the Five Armies is only better than the first Hobbit movie in the six picture saga, with Return of the King the best, by far. One area where The Battle of the Five Armies does better than The Desolation of Smaug is in visuals. Where the second Hobbit movie felt slightly unprepared for the detail brought forward when filming in high frame rate (some sets looked decidedly fake, among other things), this last one is visually spectacular, every detail is attended to – everything looks absolutely real (apart from one small thing, which I’ll get to later). This movie is the third in a trilogy initially planned as two movies, based on a book that in its entirety is far “thinner” than any of the single books the original Lord of the Rings trilogy was based on. This shows in countless realisations that what you’re currently seeing is filler, there only to flesh out the running time to what in the end makes this the shortest of all six the Middle Earth movies.

Bilbo (Freeman), together with Thorin (Armitage) and his fellow dwarves, are just exiting Lonely Mountain, where the previous movie ended. Smaug has flown out and is devastating Laketown, Bard’s (Evans) home. Bard is in prison, but after escaping in the chaos of Smaug’s attack, he manages to defeat Smaug with a black arrow. Laketown is completely destroyed, and Bard is unanimously chosen as their new leader as they head out to find shelter in Dale, the city by the mountain. Among the humans setting out for Dale, Dwarf Kili (Turner) and Elf Tauriel (Lily) have a tender moment as they are to separate when Legolas (Bloom) calls on Tauriel. From Dale the humans intend to go to the mountain and ask Thorin to honour his agreement to give them their due. Kili finds Thorin driven mad by Smaug’s enormous treasure, and, driving his band of dwarves to find the Arkenstone, he commands the mountain to be barricaded to all who’d approach.

Gandalf (McKellen) is a prisoner in Dol Guldur, and Galadriel comes to free him. She hands Gandalf to Radagast the Brown (McCoy) as the Nazgûl attack. Elrond (Weaving) and Saruman (Lee) join a spectacular fight against them, and Galadriel banishes Sauron to Mordor. This fight reminded of Fellowship’s Weathertop, and it’s fantastic. With the Dwarves awaiting their own army, the rag-tag human army is joined in Dale by Thranduil’s (Pace) elves, with an Orc army also marching on the mountain. The Elves plan to attack the barricaded mountain when the dwarven army of Dáin (Connolly) arrives, but just as the two armies engage in battle, Azog’s (Bennett) orcs attack them, spreading their forces thin. With Bilbo’s battle to regain Thorin for the cause so he can join the battle against Azog and his forces, everything is on a knife’s edge until the eventual arrival of the fifth army the title alludes to, a bit of a Deus Ex Machina if you ask me.

The big battle doesn’t come close to those of Helm’s Deep and The Battle for Minas Tirith in the original trilogy, but it’s an impressive battle greatly choreographed by Peter Jackson in this sixth movie from J.R.R. Tolkien’s books. Talking of choreographed however, the movie largely feels choreographed and not really engaging. It’s well choreographed, but the amount of what I strongly felt to be filler footage to pad the running time as well as corny dialogue limited me from getting as immersed in this as in the Rings trilogy as well as The Desolation of Smaug. The one thing I mentioned earlier that didn’t seem real? Billy Connolly’s Dáin; he doesn’t look like Connolly was ever physically there. He looks wholly like a CGI creation with the quasi-appearance of Connolly, but merely sounding like him – I recognized him by his voice, not visually. This is bizarre in 2014, and doubly so with the rest of the movie looking as good as it does. One absolutely jarring character is Ryan Gage’s Alfrid, a caricature of proportions suited to Monty Python, but nowhere near good enough to actually feature in any Monty Python production.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is a fitting yet inferior way to conclude the Hobbit trilogy, and it has, at least in my mind, reduced what Peter Jackson did from 2001 to 2003 with the original trilogy. Not by much though, but enough to notice and disappoint. It was however entertaining and pleasant to watch, and Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy only feels that much less because it is associated with that much more: his Lord of the Rings trilogy.