The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

 

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the final installment in director Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s series of novels about the inhabitants of Middle Earth. At least, it’s allegedly the final installment; after six quite lengthy films, you would assume that there isn’t much more to cover. Honestly, I’m not even certain that The Hobbit, one of the shortest books in Tolkien’s series, needed to have its plot spread over three films. For example, the opening attack by the dragon Smaug on Laketown, which was set up at the end of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, happens rather quickly here. What could have been more of a centerpiece is briskly dispatched so that we can get to the treasure—so much gold!—in the mountain of Erebor and the goals by various characters to possess it and the Arkenstone, yet another McGuffin that drives the plot but isn’t particularly valuable to the actual narrative itself. What does matter, of course, is the battle of the title. I honestly had to look up who was the fifth army. It’s obvious that the orcs, dwarves, elves, and humans are involved, but the last group was apparently the wargs (wolves) or maybe it was the eagles or maybe no one else was distracted (as I was) by trying to count to five while the battle raged on. I still couldn’t always tell the dwarves apart, but I did begin to appreciate the performance in this third film of Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenfield, who feels entitled to the fortune and becomes obsessed with possessing it. The production design, the hair and makeup, the visual effects, really all of the technical aspects of The Battle of the Five Armies are first rate, as they have been for all of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. The battle itself is not as spectacular as the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, but then how could it be? Aside from that powerful, lengthy sequence, though, what we as viewers perhaps enjoy most is seeing the development of characters about whom we have come to understand deeply. Our central character is, naturally, Bilbo (played beautifully as a young hobbit by Martin Freeman), the heart of this epic movie about powerful struggles for control, and the focus upon him makes this film somewhat more sentimental than the other entries in the trilogy. Of course, the plot here also sets up what’s going to occur in The Lord of the Ring: The Fellowship of the Ring, the initial entry in Jackson’s first Middle Earth trilogy, so there’s inevitably less of a sense of suspense here. You know how events are going to play out if you’ve seen the Lord of the Rings films. For example, it can hardly be a spoiler that Bilbo returns home at the film’s end to write the tale that would become The Hobbit. Nevertheless, the entire film offers a satisfying finale to the Hobbit trilogy and a clear introduction to the characters and some of the key plot points of the Lord of the Rings films.

Oscar Nomination: Best Achievement in Sound Editing