Film Review | The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The mental image I have of Peter Jackson’s return to JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth is that of a squirrel being pumped with steroids.

Think of Tolkien’s delicate sliver of a predecessor to The Lord of the Rings: a genteel children’s book originally penned to entertain the Oxford don’s own offspring. We meet reluctant adventurer Bilbo Baggins – the titular ‘hobbit’ of the title – who pairs up with a band of only slightly physically larger Dwarves at the behest of Gandalf the Grey, a wizard who knows more about their ensuing quest than he lets on at the beginning.

Though their action-packed journey has them encountering elves, goblins, giant spiders and Gollum – whose ‘precious’ ring becomes the lynchpin of the now-mythical Lord of the Rings trilogy – before they even get to the whole business of the dragon and the ‘five armies’ going head to head, the original novel is all done in a light touch – a charming romp that appeals to all ages and that isn’t burdened with the detailed but heavy fictional history that buttresses its sequel.

It’s as charming and lovable as a squirrel.

But Kiwi director-done-good Peter Jackson – who did the impossible by successfully transposing the Lord of the Rings saga onto the big screen without falling into the pitfall of cheap gimmicks and cheesiness, winning an Oscar in the process – decided that a run-of-the-mill squirrel wasn’t enough.

He wanted a squirrel bloated to three times its original size, with surgical military enhancements attached.

And so we finally come to the third and climactic chapter of Jackson’s illogically long-winded adaptation of Tolkien’s slim novella.

‘The Battle of the Five Armies’ may promise a military skirmish to remember, but the fact is that its core is one small part of an otherwise coherent story… one that has now been forcibly stretched to justify Jackson’s misplaced ambition.

After Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the Dwarves – led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) – reach the coveted Lonely Mountain to reclaim the dwarves’ homeland (along with some much-coveted treasure), they have to first get through the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch). When we meet them again this film around, half of their party are dodging Smaug’s flames as the dragon lays waste to the nearby Laketown, with legendary archer Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) scrambling to save himself and his family while taking aim at the beast in the hope of securing a deathly shot.

But though you’d expect a dragon to be a pretty final threat, it turns out this is only an appetiser for our beleaguered adventurers. Securing a treasure-laden cubby-hole suddenly makes the Dwarves’ new abode – their birthright – desirable by all the factions of the land. The ‘Men’ (read: human beings) from Laketown need their slice of the treasure to rebuild their dragon-charred community. But the elves, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace) are more hostile; their gold-tipped army files in demanding jewels and rekindling old grudges.

But a far more sinister force quickly overshadows the various parties’ petty squabbles for land and loot. Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) has been scouring the land in pursuit of dark rumours: the malevolent Sauron is closing ranks, and has dispatched an army of orcs in an attempt to quash the assembled armies on the Lonely Mountain in one fell swoop.

I will probably watch individual scenes from The Battle of the Five Armies over and over again, once they make their way to YouTube. I will take pleasure in savouring some cool action sequences, not to mention Lee Pace’s unrepentantly ‘fabulous’ scene-stealing as the surly elf-diva Thranduil. I will marvel over WETA’s consistently sterling effects work, and the inventive design of the orcs – the monsters terrifying in their own right but made further fascinating by quirky details, like weaponised limbs.

But I will never, not even for a second, consider any of Jackson’s latter-day visits to Middle Earth as being ‘films’ in any real sense of the word. They are an ill-conceived, Frankenstein’s creature attempt at storytelling, and what hurts most of all is that Jackson – whose tackling of the Lord of the Rings was both tasteful and formidable – seems to have succumbed almost entirely to infantile kitsch.

A cringeworthy piece of desperate fan-service is a prime example. About midway through, Jackson cuts away from the Lonely Mountain to show us Gandalf being rescued by old friends Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and the not-yet-evil Saruman (Christopher Lee) while he’s in the clutches of Sauron and his ghost-bodyguards.

The dignified characters are debased as pseudo-superheroes in one fell swoop, and the action is framed like an epileptic video game nightmare, with magic wands swooping and crackling into the ectoplasmic presences.

Things that 12-year-old boys find ‘cool’ are clearly the priority here. There’s a pornographic focus on enchanted swords and other artefacts – another sad reminder that Jackson has well and truly abandoned the measured balance of the austere and the baroque that made the original trilogy such a success. Genuine character arcs are also absent.

Starting your movie midway through an action scene is par for the course, but killing a dragon in the first sequence messes with the tempo beyond repair. You realise that what you’re watching is one big climactic sequence – not even an ‘act’ or ‘chapter’ in the true sense of the word. The experience is purgatorial.