The Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies completes the Tolkien trilogy, finally

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      Starring Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage. Rated PG.

      Peter Jackson gained so much mainstream respectability and influence from his billion-grossing Lord of the Rings trilogy that it’s easy to forget his roots in gross-out horror. On the evidence of his now-concluded Hobbit trilogy, that playful, subversive spirit may yet live on.

      How else to explain the audience-testing tediousness of these movies? At 144 minutes, The Battle of the Five Armies is the shortest of three films made from one relatively slight adventure tale. With lengthy sequences of chasing, swordplay, and brooding, Jackson appears to be making a statement about the laboriousness of epic fantasy.

      Alternatively, Jackson may also be cleverly sending up the notion of Blu-ray extras by including so many contextless sequences in the film proper. Theoretically, the motivations and plot points would be clearer to viewers who have actually watched the preceding movies directly before this one, which suggests that Jackson is establishing a new cinema of serialization, radically dismissing the notion that an individual movie should establish empathy for the subjects and comprehensibility of their behaviours. For example, the dwarves remain cartoonish and undetailed, except for Thorin (Richard Armitage) and Kili (Aidan Turner), suggesting that one’s personality is suppressed by prosthetic appliances. Is this a comment on Jackson’s own growth from squib-happy gore director to respected artist?

      While the action in this final (?) installment is daringly reduced to a bunch of random stuff happening for no reason, and coming to no conclusion, what is clear is that Jackson adores this world. Individual frames might have come directly from the desks of Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, while any 10-minute sequence is packed with exacting action choreography. He also maintains a fan-fic love for his previous trilogy, interspersing numerous cameos and even keeping the quality of CG imagery to that 2001 level. If you have the love as well, you might as well follow; to go there and back again, so to speak.

      Comments

      13 Comments

      Hazlit

      Dec 17, 2014 at 4:51pm

      You lost me at hello. Did this review have a meaning, or was its author so caught up in his own cleverness that he ended up saying a lot of nothing. (Sort of like the film itself?) I'm an academic and I thought this shit was reserved for professional snobs like me, but I guess not.

      Reason82

      Dec 17, 2014 at 5:43pm

      I'm a scientist and I think professional film reviewers can be officially classified as "professional snobs".

      Forest

      Dec 17, 2014 at 11:09pm

      This last film of the Trilogy (thank god) really is the worst of the worst. Its best offering are the animals, especially the war pig that the red-headed Dwarf rides into battle.

      Martin Dunphy

      Dec 17, 2014 at 11:23pm

      Forest:

      Do you eat foods you hate as well? Just askin'.

      Pat Crowe

      Dec 18, 2014 at 9:32am

      Steve(my precious)Hackett should have done the soundtrack.
      Dance on a Volcano, Squonk, Entangled etc. would fit right into the theme of the storyline.
      Am I obsessing, Marty?

      Forest

      Dec 18, 2014 at 10:17am

      Martin, I was dragged there by my children, which I guess is akin to being forced to eat liver. And I didn't "hate" the film. More a case of tolerating it.

      J.M.T.

      Dec 18, 2014 at 10:57am

      Your review sounds a little negative. Both The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings have been a joy to experience. When was the last time you have ever seen so much work and effort to create something, that turns out to be so epic. Ten years from now, these movies will age like fine wine. You wait. You will be watching these movies over and over.

      Ron Y

      Dec 18, 2014 at 12:05pm

      I admired Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings (except for excing the Scouring of the Shire, which is the part of Return that shows just how far hobbits could go in a warrior direction on their own turf), but those movies, while also loaded with corny humour, had great pace and also focus. They work as separate movies. We know who we are following. The Hobbit movies are larded with connections to the other movies that feel like fanfic. Worse, they cut this one in particular into a series of vignettes, not even episodes. I don't get this movie but I do get epics, fantasy flicks and swashbuckling in general, I think.

      Martin Dunphy

      Dec 18, 2014 at 12:09pm

      Pat: Maybe a little (although I could think of a few scenes that could accommodate "Los Endos" very nicely).

      Forest: Joking.

      Huh?

      Dec 18, 2014 at 3:41pm

      What does this movie have to do with homosexuality?