The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Dir: Peter Jackson
2014
****
Peter Jackson's initial Hobbit outing; An Unexpected Journey, plodded along at a snails pace. The follow up, 2013's The Desolation of Smaug, was overlong and had questionable action sequences and special effects. It's fair to say Jackson corrected all these mistakes in the final installment, The Battle of the Five Armies. The film starts where the last one left off, making for an action-packed introduction but also raising the question why such an important part of the story was cut in half in the first place. Again, stretching the one book across three films really diluted the magic of J. R. R. Tolkien's original story. Rewriting a novel for a film is one thing but to add characters and chance the plot of a much loved classic just so you can stretch it out for profit is fairly bad behavior in my book, it's okay if justified but in this case I think two films, as was originally planned, would have been sufficient. However, The Battle of the Five Armies is a joy, nothing is rushed and the pace is consistently exciting. The special effects are vastly improved and the silly action sequences have been removed (although there is a short scene whereby one character rides a horse cart, sans horse, down a hill that looked like it was straight out of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, a film Jackson (over) produced in 2011). The battle scene at Dol Guldur that sees Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Radagast (Sylvestor McCoy), Gandalf (Ian McKellen and Saruman the White (Christopher Lee) fight the Nazgul and Sauron is a stunning bit of cinema, with amazing special effects and beautiful cinematography. It's a great scene for fans of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a wonderful final performance from the late, great Christopher Lee. The concluding battle is an epic affair, there have been many epic CGI battles since Ridley Scott's 2000 film The Gladiator re-invented the genre but this has to be one of the better ones. Introducing Dain played by Billy Connolly was an act of genius alone. The last scene sees the trilogy come full circle and sets up the events of The Lord of the Rings perfectly and without the schmaltz I thought the Return of the King had. I believe Jackson learned valuable lessons from the previous films, I just wish he had got it right from the very beginning.