So Thursday night, I celebrated the release of the final
Hobbit movie, and indeed what looks very likely to be the final Middle-Earth
movie directed by Peter Jackson, in the best and most epic way possible: by
watching the first two films at the cinema back to back straight before
watching the midnight showing of Five Armies. Yes, it was a lengthy watch to
say the least, but totally worth it. I’ll be reviewing The Hobbit as a whole
later on, but for now, I’ll focus my thoughts on the concluding instalment.
The film begins directly where the 2nd film left
off, and I do mean directly: Smaug
attacking Laketown. I always thought that was a rather odd ending for the
previous film, especially since Smaug is pretty quickly dealt with in Battle in
the first ten minutes. It almost felt like having only the first two thirds of
the Battle of Helm’s Deep in the Two Towers before showing the rest in Return
of the King. Right after the resolution of the Smaug storyline, it becomes clear
that Thorin, now that he has finally reclaimed his treasure, is becoming more
and more obsessed with it, and to be honest, I think showing the start of his
greed would’ve made a much more suitable cliffhanger to Desolation of Smaug.
This film has the title of The Battle of the Five Armies. I
think it’s no exaggeration to say that this, bar the beginning of Smaug and the
resolution of a couple of other important threads, is almost entirely what the final instalment is
about, with the first half of the film being focused on the build up to the
battle as the armies start to meet and the second being the battle itself.
The build up is pretty good, as it mainly focuses on Thorin’s
greed and his growing obsession with the gold he now possesses. It’s not only
putting a strain on the friendships we’ve seen built up over the trilogy, but
his jealous possession of the treasure is leaving a lot of people pissed off,
including the men, women and children of Laketown due to so many losing their
homes in the opening ten minutes, and the Elves, because the woodland King
wants his jewels back. (Seriously.)
I really enjoyed this part of the storyline, not just
because it was a great part of the novel that I loved seeing adapted on screen –
namely, seeing one of the ‘heroes’ not be perfect and lose sight of what’s
important, a storyline that as a child was just fantastic stuff to read and as
an adult, is still a fantastic story now – but also because it’s a great
allegory of greed and how destructive it can be, something that feels even more
relevant than ever. Amongst all of this, themes of loyalty and the true meaning
of friendship are explored, and there are great moments of humour, too.
After all of this build up, we then come to the Battle
itself. Now, this is a battle that really didn’t take too much time in the
original novel – perhaps about ten, maybe twenty pages at most. In this film,
it takes at least a good, solid hour to show. Now, if this hadn’t been handled
right, this could’ve gotten old real quick. But I’ve gotta be honest: if there’s
one thing that actually makes me think, “Maybe splitting a novel 300 pages long
into 3 films wasn’t too terrible an idea”, this battle is it. It is absolutely
amazing. Peter Jackson pretty much established himself as a master of fantasy
battles on-screen in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and this battle just might
be his greatest one yet, which is really saying something.
For one thing, he really knows how to mix things up at
exactly the right moments. Sometimes, this could go from focusing on the larger
scale to something a lot more personal, sometimes, this could cut from the
battle itself to quieter moments of drama, or even just bring a whole new army
in at the worst/best moments. No matter what he does, he knows exactly how to
pace things out, know when to make things painful or brutal to watch, or, in
some cases, just plain fucking awesome.
Now, this is something I have to describe about not just the
battle itself, but of other key moments, particularly early on focusing on
Gandalf at Dol Guldur. If there was ever going to be a ‘Most Unbelievably
Fucking Badass Moment of Middle-Earth” award, the Battle of the Five Armies is
pretty much the closest thing to that. Seriously, every fucking major character (or even one played by Billy
Connolly, which is just fucking awesome by itself,) gets a moment of pure
fucking badass at different points in the film. Just when you thought, “Holy
crap, that was awesome!”, another character comes along and makes you go, “What
the fuck? Holy fucking fuck, that’s
badass on a whole new level!”, and then another
character comes along that makes you go, “You...have...got...to...be...fucking...kidding!”
I’m saying a lot about this battle not just because it takes
up a huge part of the film, but also because it’s definitely one of the more
impressive pieces of effects work I’ve seen this year. Sometimes, when a film
just keeps throwing CGI at you just for the sake of explosions or destruction,
it becomes less impressive and more boring to watch. Battle was different. Watching
it felt like being a kid again, and that’s not something I can say of many
films this year. It’s something that makes me want to see it on a big screen at
least one more time due to how impressive and genuinely epic it really is.
One more but no less important question: how well does this instalment
work as both the final instalment of the Hobbit trilogy and as, let’s face it,
a prequel to the Lord of the Rings? Because while the Hobbit was written first,
being split into three movies plus moving the focus occasionally outside of
Bilbo’s and the Dwarves, as well as being made after the adaptation of the
sequel had quite the impact on movie and geek culture, meant that we always had
to expect more than a few deliberate nods and ties to the other film trilogy. This
was something that was pretty much confirmed right from the opening scene of
Old Bilbo and Frodo in An Unexpected Journey. So, as a conclusion to one
trilogy and a bridge to another, how satisfying is it?
As a bridge, I’d say it does it just right. There’s plenty
of nice hints and foreshadowing of what’s to come, especially in the Dol Guldur
sequence, without quite overdoing it. And this is what makes it satisfying as a
conclusion to one of my favourite stories in its own right. Because The Hobbit
wasn’t written as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, it was written as very
much its own story that, by the end, didn’t really need a sequel (it says
something of Tolkien’s brilliance that he not only wrote a sequel based on one
of the tinier aspects of the story,
but wrote a sequel so brilliant that they actually decided to make the movie
version of that first). And while a
film version of that story was pretty different, in some ways, (not so much the
story itself but how that story was told), the final instalment remembers to
focus on the really important things, by the end. Not on the return of an enemy
to Middle-Earth or the importance of a magic ring, but on how a character who
had led a simple life comes back changed through his experiences, and how much
his adventures and, far more importantly, the friends he made along the way,
meant to him. And nothing highlights this more beautifully than the final scene
at the end. I won’t spoil it for you, but it will bring tears to your eyes.
9/10
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