The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

Look Who’s Tolkien

The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies
2014 USA/New Zealand
Directed by Peter Jackson
Playing now at cinemas in the UK.

Well then.

I come to what is hopefully my last, somewhat samey review of another film in the completely superfluous Hobbit trilogy. Why you need a trilogy of overlong movies for a book with a relatively low page count, I’ll never know.

Oh, wait. Yes I will... they can charge you a minimum of three times to see the movies and a minimum of three times if you like them enough to buy the three DVDs or Blu Rays. And then, as an extra special bonus, they can gouge you for the three extended cuts the following November.

What a cynical money making exercise this has become. And all in the name of adapting Tolkien who, to be honest, doesn’t really have much to do with this second, prequel trilogy of films. Much less, even, than the botched attempt at “adapting” Lord Of The Rings a while ago. You guys know The Battle Of The Five Armies lasts just about one chapter in the book, right?

Okay, so, all that being said...

The Battle Of The Five Armies is not a bad little entertainment. It’s certainly not terrible... at least not in terms of the kinds of values placed on movies by Hollywood these days... possibly it’s morally terrible but, I think I’ve already covered that ground just now and in my two previous reviews here and here.  What it does have going for it, perhaps, in comparison with the other chapters in the trilogy, is its pacing.

It’s a speedy movie and the reason for this is it’s really, in some ways, just like the last third of Return Of The Jedi (reviewed on this blog soon). That is to say, it’s just pretty much one, big, long action scene taking up the whole movie with only a few bits of talking to break it up at odd intervals. And because the special effects in this installment are, mostly, pretty well done... it’s pretty impressive eye candy for a lot of the time. It doesn’t hurt that the performances of all the actors, stars and character parts alike, are all extremely good. You will believe in the people who are fighting their battles and you will, I’m delighted to say, feel for them to some small extent too. There’s a fair crack at an emotional hook between two of the characters in this segment... not a great one, to be fair, but it is present and so there’s a humanistic context to be had here... even if the two characters I’m talking about are a) an elf and a dwarf and the fact that b) one of the characters, the elf, isn’t a character from any of Tolkien’s works and made up for a specific actress to play.

The battles are exciting and, surprisingly, Jackson and co have managed to edit them, while using a lot of cross cutting from scene to scene and character to character, in such a way that it all makes sense in your head and it’s unlikely that you’ll get confused during the action scenes. Which, being as the film is pretty much just one giant action scene, as I said before, is an obvious bonus here.

Howard Shore’s score, though, is still the real star of the picture. I might never watch the movies again in my life but I’ll certainly give the soundtrack albums a spin or two over the years. The final song isn’t exactly great but the music throughout the movie is another mini masterpiece written by a genuinely great modern composer and... I suspect... they’ll be playing in concert versions and classical album selections for many decades after he, and I for that matter, are long dust in the ground.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one, I’m afraid. This is an extremely short review, for me, and I apologise for that but, asides from keeping me entertained for a few hours, I really can’t find myself inspired by it enough to be able to dredge up anything else about either the technical merits of the movie or the way the story works. It is what it is, a Hollywood style cash in trading on the name of a much loved writer. If you’re a fan of heroic fantasy action cinema and have no interest in the source, then you should be fine with this latest pseudo-adaptation of The Hobbit. If, however, you’re not someone who can divorce the movie from its original source, and I am almost certainly guilty of doing this myself, to an extent (but at least I am trying to be objective about it), then this probably isn’t going to fill your heart with too much of anything except maybe rage. So see this one or don’t and you may, or may not, have a good time with it but... there are much better movies out there worth your time, I’m sure.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

Hobbituary! 
The Desolation Of Tolkien

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
2013 USA/New Zealand
Directed by Peter Jackson
Playing now at cinemas in the UK.

Okay then. I suppose I’d best write this thing... although I’ve not been looking forward to it.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug has a great musical score by Howard Shore... and that’s one of the very few positives I can really identify in it.

To elaborate on that first item... Shore did wonders with his scores to similarly bad adaptations of the works of Tolkien for Peter Jackson and his score here, both in the film and as a stand alone listen, is no exception. It is a work of beauty which will live on long after the film has been forgotten. Absolutely gorgeous.

As to the rest...

Well this film takes bits of Tolkien from here, there and everywhere and tries to weave them into the basic, compromised skeleton of The Hobbit at every twist and turn of the narrative. Some bits come from Tolkien and other bits are merely stolen from him. The orcs, for example, if memory serves me correctly, have no place being in The Hobbit. If people were worried about a thin children’s book being turned into 9 hours plus of movie just to try and capitalise in the success of the hasty pseudo-adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, then this film in particular shows them that they had every right to be. It’s padded out almost beyond recognition and even the casual reader of Tolkien (I admit, it’s been about three decades since I last read his stuff) will detect the extensions and travesty at large throughout the movie.

As much as I am still angry about all of the stuff Jackson left out and abbreviated in Lord Of The Rings, I am as angry about all the stuff he’s mockingly stuffed into these so-called prequels. I recognised occasional feint bits of Tolkien amongst the wreckage that is The Desolation Of Smaug and even the comical barrels sequence had been enlarged to a kick ass battle/chase sequence involving orc and elf carnage which turned it into an epic instead of staying with the modest childrens book that The Hobbit was intended to be. The Lord Of The Rings was an epic book... The Hobbit was not. The only thing that really bound it to the sequel that Tolkien went on to write, was the one ring. And while Tolkien was indeed guilty of making changes to the original text for future editions after the success of his more adult themed sequel, and I’m thinking of the changes to Smeagol’s character to make him more obsessed and hostile to Bilbo regarding the ring, he never went fully gung ho “George Lucas, Greedo shoots first” revisionist on his original tale the way Peter Jackson is trying to use The Hobbit as a lead in for his original trilogy of films.

As a movie, divorced from its relationship from the original work, I’m afraid it doesn’t do much better. I quite enjoyed, to an extent, certain passages of the initial movie but this one didn’t nearly keep me as entertained as the first one did and it’s not what I’d choose to see at the movies if I wasn’t already invested in it by having seen the previous four...

It’s well acted, more than competently edited, has great special effects and, as I remarked at the start of this review, has an incredibly beautiful score. It’s just such a shame that the intent behind the decision to layer on all this extra and unwieldy stuff into a trilogy just to make tons of money from the initial audiences to the first trilogy are the main motivation behind the decision to make these films. It shows itself up in every frame of film. It even has something not dissimilar to the furnace scene from Alien 3 spliced into it when we get to the scenes of Smaug. It just felt wrong.

So... brilliant music, which was expected and which I will continue to listen to for a long time and catch any concerts I can if Shore tours it like he did with his music from The Lord Of The Rings. However, like so many gorgeous scores written for bad movies (Jerry Goldsmith was a master at getting those kinds of projects to work on), the film fails Tolkien quite badly, in my humble opinion... although it’s obviously going to make tons of money. So Jackson and the studios can certainly sleep well on that. Job done.

At some point, though, I’d love to see some proper movies made from Tolkien’s original books.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D

Kicking The Hobbit

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D
New Zealand/USA 2012
Directed by Peter Jackson
Playing at cinemas now.

Warning: I quite like the works of one J. R. R. Tolkien... 
so you might not like this review!

Sigh. I expect this will be a fairly short review.

I’d be more angry at this travesty but I just can’t summon the strength after Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy annoyed me so much with the amount of stupid omissions and additions... not to mention the predictability of the master shots and close-ups within the edit (fortunately, this movie doesn’t quite suffer from those two symptoms nearly as much as its predecessors did).

There are some very good things about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey 3D and, in fairness to the director and production team, I’ll try to list as many of those things as I can... but I’m afraid this one played out as my worst fears for the project.

It’s a hard thing for me to write because I love movies so much and this “version” of The Hobbit is certainly a great piece of cinema. It’s exactly the kind of spectacle and feeling of epic fantasy which cinema was made for... and it’s competently handled and, I feel, will please a lot of movie goers. However, there is also a sense of betrayal and disrespect for the original works which leaves me with worse than mixed feelings about it.

I’m not the biggest Tolkien fan but I did like his books, The Hobbit and Lord Of The Rings (the latter of which I read in the 70s when it was right and proper that it was all published and read as a single volume and not split into three separately bound volumes, like is fashionable again these days) and found them to be good. I also remember Bernard Cribbins reading The Hobbit on TV in the 1980s on the BBC programme Jackanory (those were the days) and scratching many a furrowed brow at the ZX Spectrum game of the book, which I never did manage to complete.

Perhaps this is why I’m so “let down” with these new movie versions of the books, which I feel do not respect Tolkien’s original material as much as they should and are, mostly, poor adaptations. Goodish movies... but just generally bad versions of the source.

Here’s what’s good about this latest...

Great spectacle, competently put together and competently edited (as I said before). There are also some great performances, including an absolutely brilliant, own the role, turn from Martin Freeman as young(er) Bilbo and he seems to have great chemistry with Ian McKellen, who is obviously relishing his return to Gandalf The Grey.

There’s a brilliant performance by Sylvester McCoy (the Seventh Doctor) who gives a real sense of impish wizardry as Radagast The Brown but... you know... that character’s NOT IN THE BLOODY BOOK! Also a “nice to see him again” cameo scene from the great Christopher Lee, back as Saruman The White who... well you know... ISN’T IN THE HOBBIT YOU IDIOTS! Also good to see Cate Blanchett, one of the absolute finest and versatile actresses of her generation, reprising her role as the stunningly sensual Galadriel... that’d be, if memory serves, the same Galadriel who WASN’T IN THE ORIGINAL NOVEL! And it’s even got more dramatic weight for the character of Thorin Oakenshield as he faces down the orc who killed his father... who I think merited ONE LINE IN FLASHBACK in the book and wasn’t mentioned again.

What’s going on?

Well, let’s have a think here. Lord Of The Rings made loads of money and each film was three hours or a little more. The studios want a long trilogy they can make the same kind of tentpole money from.

The current edition of The Hobbit on sale is a short book numbering approximately 400 pages. Whereas Lord Of The Rings currently flags up 1664 pages (it always was a thick book).

And yet The Hobbit is being turned into a trilogy totalling almost nine hours in it’s first release cut... so you do the math here. It doesn’t take too much to figure out that this movie is going to be padded out to kingdom come... and padded out it is.

Jackson has tried to tie the whole thing to his earlier trilogy, when no extra adhesive was needed other than what was already on the written page. Honestly. Rock giant fights and troll battles! Clever scenes have been turned into action scenes for the sake of giving a young audience something to gawp at... it may be good cinema but it’s hardly Tolkien. He’s even got Ian Holm back as “old Bilbo” and Elijah Wood back as Frodo to give audience recognition. What rubbish!

Granted, some of the characters and incidents are sourced from other works by Tolkien but... let them stay where they were... what we have here is a greatest hits compilation but remixed with extra beats, bells and whistles which were, frankly, not needed and are certainly not welcome.

The one saving grace of this movie, like the original trilogy, is that Howard Shore is back on scoring duties. He’s tied up a lot of the leitmotif in this one by reusing thematic material (such as his steal... err... homage to Dvorak’s New World Symphony) or by retrofitting the music so it gives a more simplistic version of a theme which will grow and mutate (backwards) into the main melody lines used in Lord Of The Rings (such as Elmer Bernstein’s bandit theme from The Magnificent Seven... err... I mean, oh heck, if you know these scores you know exactly what I mean). His music is, though, absolutely fantastic and the main reason I’ll probably be going to see the next two installments (and forcing myself to write reviews of them). So if you like good music... that’s a reason to bother seeing this film.

Anyway, I think I’m about done here. All in all, I’d say I enjoyed The Hobbit a fair bit more than Jackson’s raping... err... interpretation of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy so I have to give it points for that. I think if you’re purely looking for some spectacular cinematic distraction from this movie then you’ll probably be in luck. However, I would warn all fans of Tolkien to beware... this is really going to annoy and irritate the heck out of you. A few well chosen references and basic plot points do not, a Tolkien movie, make!