Let's Go Out To The Movies: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (PG-13 - Warner Bros. - 2 hrs, 24 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

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

When I first heard that the subtitle of the final Hobbit movie was changed from There and Back Again to The Battle of the Five Armies, I feared that meant that said battle was all this movie would be. These movies have been a weird experiment. After having made fantasy viable blockbuster material with Lord of the Rings, could Peter Jackson and company live up to those monumental expectations while adapting Tolkien's much smaller and simpler earlier book?

The results have been, interesting. An Unexpected Journey worked fine as a fantasy adventure in its own right, and left me semi-hopeful as to the state of things to come. Desolation of Smaug on the other hand, was on average mediocre and downright bad in a lot of parts. I'm sure many of you who care about this series have seen or at least heard of the barrel scene by now, and it also stops in the middle of the climax. Seriously, you could not come up with a better joke about how drawn out this series is than the actual ending of Desolation of Smaug.

The Battle of the Five Armies opens with that climax (which, incidentally, is nowhere near long enough to justify tacking it onto this film) and the plot proper begins with its aftermath. Now that the dragon Smaug has been killed, the massive amount of gold he has been hoarding for sixty-odd years in the Lonely Mountain is now up for grabs. The company of dwarves we've been following during this series, or really just their nominal leader, claim it as their birthright. The human survivors of Smaug's attack on Laketown need it to finance rebuilding their community. An army of elves shows up to check dwarven power in the area and keep an army of orcs from taking the strategically important position, a different army of dwarves shows up because the dwarven leader happens to be the cousin of their king, all of these people end up coming to blows over the mountain leading to the battle of the title, which is drawn out over the entire movie.

I'll give Jackson this, he definitely knows how to make things look amazing, you can say that about all of these movies. He clearly at least cares about what he's making, and every frame becomes a painting under his direction and a crack team of set designers, costume and prop makers, and the best rendering software Hollywood money can buy. Unfortunately, all the visual panache in the world can't hide the fact that, at the end of the day, this series is what it always looked like, Peter Jackson taking a three movie victory jog after the monumental achievement that was Lord of the Rings by doing a studio financed fan film version of The Hobbit. I never expected these movies to measure up to what is probably still the best work of fantasy in film of the 21st' Century, even if it is possible to "top" that, you don't do it by adapting a simple story for children at bedtime, but there simply is not enough story there to stretch over a grand total of nine hours running time.

The Hobbit film trilogy has ended with a whimpering bang. I'm not exactly angry with these films, mostly I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed that Jackson doesn't seem to know how to quit when he's ahead, that so much capital and talent went into a series, that in the end, is little more than a Middle-Earth themed amusement park ride. That being said, if all you want to see a huge fantasy battle manned by a cast of actors giving it their all, I suppose its worth a matinee.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B