Few opinions will be swayed by the final instalment in Peter Jackson’s big-screen chronicle of Tolkien’s Middle Earth – audiences have fully engaged or given up by now. But it can’t hurt for skeptics to know that the last link in the chain is also the shortest of the trilogy (and for that matter, the trimmest of all six films).
Over the course of “just” 144 minutes, The Battle of the Five Armies sets up the board for The Lord of the Rings while capping off the tripartite Hobbit with an enormous helping of fantasy warfare.
With the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) winging his way toward the city of Laketown, bent on vengeance, dwarf liege Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his company at last occupy the Lonely Mountain unchallenged and set about searching for the Arkenstone which will cement Thorin’s kingship.
In Laketown, Bard the bowman (Luke Evans) confronts Smaug to protect his city and kin while the elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the dwarves who remained behind attempt to rescue Bard’s family and others from fiery destruction.
Meanwhile, the powers of the White Council – Lady Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Lord Elrond (Hugo Weaving) of the elves, alongside the wizard Saruman the White (Christopher Lee) – arrive in Dol Guldur, the stronghold where Gandalf (Ian McKellen) is held captive, to confront the ascendant Necromancer.
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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Directed by Peter Jackson. |
But even as the hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), newly minted as a heroic adventurer, comes into his own, Thorin, finally upon his throne – metaphorically speaking – slowly succumbs to a “dragon sickness” of obsessive greed that is suspiciously similar to the insidious pull of the One Ring.
And other eyes are upon the riches of the Lonely Mountain. Elven king Thranduil (Lee Pace) covets gems unearthed long ago by the dwarves there and leads an army to reclaim them. Worse, a massive orc host gathers under Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett), who has sworn to end Thorin’s line forever.
Five Armies is not much of a standalone film, occupied as it is with completing the trilogy’s storylines and laying the foundations for those of LOTR. For instance, Smaug is even more of an anti-climax than he was in the second film because here – divorced by a year’s wait from the context of his confrontation with Bilbo and the dwarves underneath the Lonely Mountain – he begins the film in high fury and expeditiously meets his end so that the protagonists can move on to other, grander conflicts.
But for those who have been paying attention enough to care about the overarching storytelling, the payoff is in spades, as five armies meet on the mountainside with all of the chief characters among them, including Legolas (Orlando Bloom), Radagast (Sylvester McCoy), and even the shape-shifter Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt).
After more than 10 hours of viewing time, the protagonists have won our sympathies, if only through a war of attrition. But that doesn’t mean the emotional impact of climactic victories or deaths is felt as it should be, and the significance of lives lost goes curiously unremarked, perhaps to be remedied in the inevitable – and typically worthwhile – extended edition for release on home media.
At any rate, the dwarves do feel like family after all this time, and one thing is for certain, the absence of a clan of dwarvish folk will be felt on re-watching LOTR.
Special effects have improved since the original trilogy and the heroes are (mostly) different, but in myriad details, both large-scale and minute, visually and plot-wise, the feeling of retreading old ground remains.
Jackson appears at every turn to hew to the old maxim not to fix what isn’t broken. But the amount of recycling – the sheer number of seeming redundancies between Hobbit and LOTR trilogies, from rescues by eagles to the awesome exercise of Galadriel’s full power – is astonishing.
Then again, if there doesn’t seem to be all that much worth getting truly excited about, it is in part the fault of the director, but not for the usual reason. Beginning with The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson has realized Middle Earth so convincingly that he has made the fantastic seem almost mundane and in the process left audiences more jaded than before.
As the quibbling of critics and detractors – mostly over minutiae – attests, Jackson has succeeded in bringing Tolkien’s myths to life. The twin sagas of Middle Earth now take their place, deservedly, among the massive epics of the screen. And they will make one heck of a Blu-ray marathon.