The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

It’s tough to conjure up many more words for Peter Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth. At the start of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies the audience has spent a collective 15+ hours in the world of Hobbits, Wizards, Elves and Orcs. That is frankly astounding. What Jackson has done in sheer volume is impressive, the fact that his vision is a compelling, often intoxicating one feels like icing on the cake.

The Hobbit 3 picks up immediately where Desolation of Smaug left us hanging last Christmas. Smaug is wreaking fiery havoc on the tiny village of Laketown as our hero Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his band of dwarves look on helplessly from the mountain above. It’s nice that the third film cuts through much of the bloat (though not all) of the first two installments and gets right to the action at hand. It helps as well that the opening Smaug siege is Jackson’s most inspired set piece in some time.

After the opening salvo it becomes apparent that the rest of Middle Earth knows that Smaug has been sitting on a lot of treasure and wouldn’t mind a taste. The dwarves led by Thorin (Richard Armitage) would love nothing more than to have the treasure all for themselves. Hence…battle…five armies…etc.

In execution Battle of the Five Armies most closely resembles Return of the King but without any of the soul of the first trilogy. Here, it too often feels like Jackson is just playing out the string rather than really throwing himself into it. That’s not to say there aren’t epic battles, grand speechifying and heavy love stories (there are…a lot of each) it just doesn’t feel like the first time around.

That could be chalked up to various factors but I do think that CGI plays a major part in my aversion to the Hobbit films. Jackson and his team at WETA took such care in creating a Middle Earth that felt lived in and real in the first trilogy. Actors donned wild make up, sets were built practically and when CGI was absolutely necessary Jackson would combine the techniques seamlessly. In the Hobbit, everything has a clean shine of a new computer program. I would go so far as to say these last 3 films are much uglier than the original trilogy possibly because it’s been easier to build the movies on a green screen than in the real world.

That’s not to say Jackson doesn’t deliver some crazed pleasure in TBOFTA, he definitely does. If battles are what you came for than do not fret, there are so many battles in this movie I was numb by the end. The suitably epic scale does a nice job of tying up the new trilogy with a neat and tidy link to the old films. Fans (including myself) will surely find at least something to take from this visual smorgasbord even if they forget the majority of the film 10-minutes after leaving.

Are The Hobbit films good? Yes and no. On one hand Peter Jackson’s world is one that I always enjoy going back to. His affection for the characters and the realm should never be in question and it’s always shown through. On the other hand it kind of feels greedy to ask the man to return again and again to the same well when there are so many other wells to explore. Twenty hours of Middle Earth is quite the legacy and I can’t wait to see what Jackson does next. Maybe something about normal size humans with regular ears and feet is a good place to start.

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