While Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is a landmark series of films that will go down in history as being seminal works, his prequel trilogy, The Hobbit, has been a mixed bag that has produced diminishing returns. At this point, this is the sixth film that Jackson has made that’s set in this same world, striking this same tone, and that has a run time that’s well over two hours. Even for huge fans of the overall franchise, the magic has to be running out. Truth be told, though The Hobbit started off as a less than perfect though perfectly entertaining companion piece to The Lord of the Rings, with this final chapter, The Battle of the Five Armies, the series as a whole has revealed itself to be quite a tedious slog.
If you’ve seen the first two Hobbit movies, then you should have a good idea of what this one is about. If you haven’t, then you’re going to be confused, because Five Armies exists as little more than an extended action climax that caps off all of the setup that was put into place by the first two films. When The Desolation of Smaug ended, the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) had left his home in The Lonely Mountain and was heading toward the nearest town, presumably with the intention of destroying it and killing everyone who lives there. When we pick things up in this film, that’s just what’s happening. The dragon attack is big and spectacular and starts the film off on an exciting note. And then another big action scene follows it. And another. And another. It doesn’t take long before the sight of hoards of CG beings smashing into each other becomes numbing and boring.
Probably the main reason for that is that all of the fighting pushes the main character, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), completely to the side, giving him very little to do and no real journey to take. You’d think that wouldn’t be the case—you know, because the movie is called The Hobbit, and Bilbo is the only hobbit that appears in it—but it is. When this trilogy first started, Bilbo was sheltered and naive. By the end of the second film he was a hardened adventurer who had gained the respect of his comrades. So, if he was fully developed by the end of the second film, then what was the point of this third film existing at all? It’s been said over and over again, but there just isn’t enough story in the source material to justify stretching The Hobbit out to three beyond-feature-length films. If watching multiple armies of computer animated people battling at length over the rights to a treasure that’s locked up in a mountain is your thing, then this is definitely the movie for you, but most sane people are going to check out halfway through.
The thing is, all of that action the movie stuffs itself with isn’t even entertaining on a base level. There was a sequence in the first Hobbit movie where a big chase involving a lot of people moving over huge areas of land happened, and the way that Jackson was able to pull his camera back and keep track of what angles he was presenting the action from in order to maintain the visual continuity of who was where and why was truly impressive. There’s nothing of the sort here. The battles are swirling, contextless messes that convey no sense of where the combatants are in relation to one another, and therefore there’s no sense of tension or intrigue to anything that’s happening.
There’s very little consequence to any of the warfare on display, as well. Every once in a while the camera will linger on a dead body or two to remind you that you’re not watching an episode of The A-Team, but in general you watch thousands of creatures attacking each other with pointy objects and there’s very little sense of danger or reality (the problem this whole trilogy has had where everything is computer generated and gravity doesn’t seem to exist continues in this installment) to any of it. Perhaps it’s obstinate to expect a PG-13 movie that’s aimed at a wide audience to properly convey the brutality of war, but that’s why you don’t make a PG-13 movie that’s aimed at a wide audience that’s almost exclusively about war. The very personal stakes of the Lord of the Rings trilogy are completely absent here, with the focus being put on faceless armies attempting to acquire wealth and land instead. Boring.
Despite any deficiencies in this particular film, there is always a bit of magic that comes from Peter Jackson making a movie set in this world, starring these actors, and with a James Horner score though, and this movie does have that sweeping-you-away-to-another-place thing going for it, at least for a while. When those opening credits come up on the screen in that familiar font and that Middle Earth-sounding music pumps through the theater speakers, there’s an energy bolt that shoots up your spine and a chill that travels across your skin. That’s literally all that this movie has going for it though—that it conjures up fond memories of what came before. It’s great that Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies exist, but it’s a mercy that his Hobbit movies are finally over. Next time you’re jonesing to revisit these characters and this world, you’d be better off just watching the first trilogy and not bothering with the prequels at all.
