Being a completionist (and a masochist simultaneously), I decided to finish up Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit series with the final film as it came out on iTunes today. I wrote a pretty scathing review for the first one and didn’t bother writing up a review for the second one, despite having seen it. So how does the third movie in the series hold up?
I suppose the advantage of writing this particular review is that quite honestly there’s not a whole lot for me to talk about. Where my first review was a giant rant on a clusterfuck of an adventure, the climax to the series is virtually a near non-stop two hour epic battle sequence. There are a few deviations here and there namely the finish with the fight with Smaug, the side note of Galadriel one shotting Sauron and small breaks. But overall, the movie pretty much is just the slight build up of tension between the dwarves and everyone else and the massive fight with the orcs.
When you look at the entire series, especially the length of this movie compared to the longer Lord of the Rings movies, it’s pretty short. You can tell that the movie was attempting to squeeze in anything it could find just because there wasn’t enough content to stretch across three movies. There’s a few trivial moments such as the fight scene with Elrond showing his fighting prowess against the Nazgul, the ogres/trolls with their back mounted catapults and some rock worms that showed up but never really did anything, which looked interesting. However, all of that is simply visual masturbation that taken out of context from the Tolkien world would be acceptable. But within the limits of a single, very well known book added absolutely nothing to the point of the story.
So the first part of the movie picks up where The Desolation of Smaug left off: the dragon wrecking Laketown. The main part of this segment of the story is the rise of Bard as the hero/leader of the town when he manages to slay Smaug with his Black Arrow. Smaug lands on the Master, who was the former governor and creates a hole in leadership. Right after that moment, we finally get the title of the movie.
I’m going to pause in my recounting to talk about the setup between both movies. I totally get the need to create a hook between movies. The first one did a reasonable job in opening up that link to the second one. But it really felt in watching Smaug’s demise that it deserved to be the climax of the second movie. Smaug is possibly one of the best known dragons in fantasy by name. Although his destruction of Laketown and demise were spectacular, The Battle of the Five Armies really needed to focus on the war between the five factions. After Smaug’s death, you quickly forget about him as he rarely is mentioned beyond the connection of the treasure being cursed by the taint of the dragon.
To me Smaug’s death is real a travesty in story telling. You would think that his death belonged in the second story to give the ending a triumphant note, but place the army of the orcs in the background and Thorin’s growing inner turmoil to be the hooks leading into the third movie. Here, we are not allowed to digest and appreciate Smaug, except as a graphical footnote in a completely mishandled and abused series.
With Smaug dead, the people of Laketown and the dwarves begin to rebuild their lives. Actually, the people of Laketown are pretty much screwed over since they lost everything, have no direction and the dwarves selfishly (most notably Thorin) lock themselves up within Erebor. In reality, the only selfish one is Thorin as the other dwarves for the most part have little to no character at all. But we’ll get to Thorin’s character issues later.
Since Peter Jackson needed to fill space in, we get the useless adventures of Gandalf/Galadriel to continue bridging the story with the Lord of the Rings series. This part seemed more like a fan (dis-)service as, outside of adding filler, had the purpose of showing just what the heck Gandalf was doing on his off time, demonstrating the powers of Elrond and Galadriel and finally alluding to Sarumon’s eventual turn towards evil. Visually, the scene was impressive as we finally get to see Elrond’s true power while Galadriel’s weird/psycho elf form manifests for a second time. However, the way things unravel reminded me of the George Lucas’ sloven attempt to stitch together the prequels for Star Wars with the classic series. Maybe it wasn’t that horrid (such as the emotionless naming of Luke and Leia) but this part of the story wasn’t necessary at all.
Another excessive segue was the non-existent romance between Kili and Tauriel. This part was beyond pointless as everyone who is even a partial fan of the book well knows. But what really drives me crazy is that this situation stinks of typical Hollywood formulaic crap which seems to dictate that every movie requires a romance/love scene. While I can appreciate on a very low level how the film makers wanted to revisit the tragic story of Beren and Luthien, the whole thing felt hollow, contrived and just uncomfortable. I suppose AD&D has put a damper on most non-human interracial dating for me but this subplot added nothing.
Along with Tauriel, we had a side adventure with Legolas who investigates Mount Gundabad. This was another pointless moment that I suppose tried to foreshadow the coming of a large army to impress the audience. Once again this situation felt pointless and just weak in conveying what I think was the desire to create a sense of an epic battle as well as provide Orlando Bloom more screen time.
From here, I’m going to cut to the chase because the remaining movie was just a massive battle scene with a few interspersed points of drama. There were a few innovative moments in the movie such as the dwarven shieldwall where the elves leaped right over. Visually, that was pretty cool. Also, the dumb trolls using themselves as battering rams was a neat idea. Yet I felt that the film maker was trying too hard to push the boundaries of what war could look like from a creative side rather than talk about the tragedy of war.
And here’s where the movie just came off flat and typically Hollywood superficial for me. If you were to compare this part to either the Battle at Helms Deep in The Two Towers or Theoden’s charge in Return of the King, the scenes in the Hobbit were filmed more as gratuitous efforts rather than emotional ones. Those efforts such as Gandalf’s rescue of Theoden in charging at a very steep angle with the power of the morning sun blinding the armies of the orcs had a far more artistic feeling where the goal was attempting to bring to life the portraits painted by other Tolkien artists. The war efforts in The Hobbit were too mechanical and lacked the depth from the previous films.
Also, there’s not a lot of important dialog between the three factions to create enough believable tension. So when the orcs arrive and the men, dwarves and elves band up, we’re forced to just accept an alliance from nothing. We KNOW that they’ll join forces not just because Tolkien said so but because there’s no other believable alternative.
When Thorin meets his end, I wanted to cry for him but I couldn’t. His character arc is just too weak and reminiscent of Boromir’s own demise. Yes, greed kills, we get that. But the real tragedy should’ve been around the war rather than just selfish desire. In addition, Martin Freeman did such a poor job trying to be odd and Hobbit-like in expressing emotion for his loss. I feel as though Freeman didn’t really know what to do with the character half the time since most of the time that should’ve been devoted to him growing as a character was eaten up through poorly planned diversions.
Eventually, we see Bilbo return home and attempt to revert to his old ways of life. Like Frodo and his companions, we revisit how venturing forth as a hobbit eventually changes someone. Yet if there was more to that for Bilbo’s character outside of the Ring and little mention of Thorin as his friend, we don’t really feel it and are left with the map that Bilbo was reminiscing about just prior to Gandalf showing up.
When they announced the series as a triology, I was quite ecstatic. However, the first movie was tragically bad and you could sense that Peter Jackson was in a bad spot to try and find enough material for three movies. Gone was the emotion and love put into the first three movies. You could sense that Jackson lost his hunger to put forth something with real meat since people would rush out to see it just because it had his name and the Hobbit on it. The truth is that this lasted too long and would have been better off in the hands of a hungrier, lesser known director with Jackson as the producer.
The problem with a movie like the Hobbit is that the standards for epic fantasy have risen dramatically. The Lord of the Rings series did manage to heighten what could be done for epic fantasy instead of turning it into a crude Conan the Barbarian or AD&D movie styled joke. However, it is television with series like Game of Thrones where we’re seeing the storytelling and depth of epic fantasy being pushed to soaring heights.
Jackson’s current vision of the Hobbit seemed to target children much like how the book was originally written for Tolkien’s kid. However, the expectations are much higher since people enjoy the darker, gray areas of story telling these days. It is too formulaic and dumbed down to be worth much outside of a late night popcorn showing to help with ones insomnia at best.