The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
Originally published March 2017At last! We've come to the final film of the tediously mediocre Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. After watching Part II, The Desolation of Smaug, I decided to power through another 2.5 hours to see how the story wrapped up. Smaug had managed to capture my interest enough to make me a little invested in the story and gave me hope that the last film might be better. Alas, I'd say it's the worst of the three.
Why do I think it's the worst? It's not just because they wrap up the cliffhanger with Smaug before the sub-title card even shows up. It's because it's the tail end of the story's second act and all of the final act is stretched out for the whole movie. The last act of a story is usually shorter than the other two because it's the climax and resolution. Everything else was supposed to have led up to this moment, which quickly happens, and then there's closure. In most movies, this is all less than 30 minutes long. With The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, however, it's a whole 144 minutes.
Image: Warner Bros. | This highlight will be over quick, unlike the rest of the film.
Pros
Said it before, say it again: New Zealand and Weta's sets are still pretty.
Solid acting from Richard Armitage for the subtle shifts in his thoughts and mood.
Cons
TOO LONG!
Once the battle starts, it never ends.
The dumb "dragon sickness" arc takes forever to end.
Necromancer side-quest continues to be a pointless waste of time and now detracts from the better films of this universe.
If you weren't tired of the formulaic battles with the predictable music swells and deus ex eagles, you will be by the time it's over.
TOO..... LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG!
Plot & Thoughts
That whole "3 movies for one book" problem I've had with the Hobbit films from the start comes to a head in this final episode. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the one that suffers the most for this greedy mistake. There is next to no plot for this movie. Since it is mostly the final act of the original story, and it shows. There's not a whole lot left to develop. It's just a 2-hour climax and resolution to this stretched-thin tale.
The opening few minutes is the conclusion to the Smaug cliffhanger from Part II. It feels like it doesn't belong here because of how suddenly we're thrown into the action and how quickly it wraps up. Yet, if they had included this sequence in the last movie, there wouldn't have been a cliffhanger, or much else to chew on before we get to the lengthy war porn of the titular battle. Before we get to the hour-long battle, however, we get the last bit of character development from King Thorin and the fan-service-filled conclusion to Gandalf's side quest with the mysterious necromancer.
Image: Warner Bros.
With Smaug out of the picture, Thorin and his dwarves can move back into their home and reclaim their mountain filled with treasure. However, there's some random "dragon sickness" over the treasure that makes Thorin greedy and paranoid. His ambition and desire to complete the quest and reclaim his kingdom has manifested into a schizophrenic obsession with the treasure that apparently happens when a dragon sleeps in the treasure for years. I don't know. There were hints throughout the movies that this happened to other kings who were surrounded by gold, but Thorin was supposed to be different and it wouldn't happen to him. But then it still did. Now, we have to deal with greedy Thorin for about an hour until someone finally snaps him out of it.
Thorin's subplot, though perhaps part of the actual books, feels forced and unnecessarily long. More than half of the movie passes before we finally get back the character he's been this whole time. It is an arbitrary reason to create conflict between him and other potential allies during this big climactic battle. He has to stay screwed up extra long, though, so that when he finally snaps out of it, he can come to the rescue and turn the tide of battle. Sorry if that was a spoiler to you, but if you've watched any movies in the past 10 years, none of this should be surprising. The movie makes no attempt to make these predictable events any less formulaic, so I will make no attempts at covering up what you could already predict for yourself.
Image: Warner Bros.
Speaking of not-spoiler spoilers: the necromancer side-quest. Guess what? The necromancer was Sauron. Who the hell else would it be? The reveal of the necromancer's identity as the main villain of Lord of the Rings was actually disclosed in The Desolation of Smaug, but his inclusion in these films is more egregious here. For one thing, to conclude this whole unnecessary sub-plot about a villain who actually has no impact on this story, a big fan-service battle is fought between the servants of Sauron and the favorite high-level heroes like Saruman, Elron, and Galadriel. I highly doubt these characters were even in the Hobbit book at all, let alone dancing around fighting transparent forms of ring-wraiths and the visual representation of Sauron.
Sauron's presence here happens to be one of my biggest gripes with these movies for a multitude of reasons. For one thing, even as someone who hasn't read the books, this whole side-quest Gandalf was on to find out the necromancer's identity and the focus on his white orc apprentice sticks out like a made-up thumb. None of this feels necessary for any reason other than they had to fabricate a bunch of material because they had stretched out the storyline across multiple long movies—heaven forbid Peter Jackson makes a movie that's under 120 minutes! I don't immediately mind if filmmakers make stuff up or take something out that was in the source material. I'm all for creative interpretation and re-envisioning, otherwise, you're just going to get remakes of material, like the Psycho remake where it's just a shot-for-shot retelling of the same movie with inferior actors. However, I also should not be able to immediately tell when something was clearly written and created for the screen by someone far more or less talented than someone else. Sauron and Gandalf's made-up side-quest to discover him are just a few of the most obvious changes that were clearly made to fill up screen time. Other than the titular battle, of course, but we'll get to that.
Image: Warner Bros.
The main problem I have with Sauron's presence in the film is that it somewhat retcons the opening hour of Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring. You remember, right? It's one of the movies that was not only directed by the same guy but starred some of the same actors and is supposed to be in the same exact universe. Since Fellowship is supposed to take place decades later, it would be weird for Gandalf to go through all this trouble, know that Sauron is alive, and then suddenly act surprised that Sauron is alive when he discovers that Bilbo has the Ring of Power. It loses its impact in his shock and dismay at the realization because apparently, he should already know by that point. It just makes their whole effort to destroy the ring seem procrastinated like they could have started it decades ago but decided to take a vacation instead. If Gandalf knew Sauron was alive and needed the Ring of Power, he wouldn't have ever let Bilbo leave with a ring without inspecting it.
But this movie isn't called The Hobbit: The Unnecessary Inclusion of Sauron, or The Hobbit: The Pitiful Attempt to Drag this Story Out for Three Films. It's the Battle of the Five Armies, right? What if I told you the battle seemed made up too? Well, I double-checked this one and there is indeed a battle of five armies in the Hobbit book, but apparently, there's not a whole lot of content there. In fact, the main climax of Tolkien's book was with Smaug and this was just an after-event as part of the resolution. Again, I don't mind if you decide to interpret the source material in a new way, but I shouldn't be able to tell if it's all made up. Unfortunately for me, this last movie is almost entirely fabricated by the screenwriters and it all felt just as forced and out-of-place as the rest of the material.
Image: Warner Bros.
The battle is certainly something that looked nice on someone's computer, but the amount of CGI and green screen does this film no favors. Unlike the more practical-effect-driven work of the Lord of the Rings movies, a lot of the battle lacks impact or weight. It's all just pretty and stylized. I experienced no excitement or tension watching the war-porn for over an hour. In fact, I was actually quite bored and wished I'd gone back to playing Civilization V. It all took so long to end, even the final battles between named heroes and villains seemed like they kept going on for no reason. Not to mention, I couldn't have cared less when other arbitrary or likely-fabricated side-stories concluded, like the love story, or Legolas' inclusion.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
As I've said, I never read The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, but I've seen enough movies to notice when something was hastily added to a screenplay to fill up screen time. I don't know if I had ever seen such a blatant fabrication of mediocre material before I saw The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, however. Most of this movie was made up by the filmmakers to drag this film series out and it shows. The conflicts feel arbitrary. The battles themselves take far too long to end. A villain, who no one was supposed to know was alive for another 60 years, makes an unnecessary appearance as the mastermind antagonist for this whole thing.
It was just supposed to be an adventure about some dwarves reclaiming their home from a dragon, not some bloated, growth of a story that's stitched onto the Lord of the Rings franchise. It was a simple story that was stretched out so far that by the time they got to the third movie, there wasn't anything left in the source material to use, and it showed. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies sucks and represents the biggest failings of this film franchise.
Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think in the comments!
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