Five Armies, No Waiting

For the most part the holidays were spent in attitudes of collapse, but I did manage to drag myself to the theater to view The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies.

Those who remember my notes on the previous two films will recall that I feared the third movie would consist only of the Battle of Lake Town, the Battle of Dol Guldur, and the Battle of the Five Armies, for two and a half hours of solid combat.  And alas, I was pretty much right.

The Battle of Dol Guldur, at least, is mercifully brief, and has a limited cast.  Galadriel wins the fight via the unexpected tactic of holding her breath till she turns blue.  (Tolkien geeks will rejoice that Narya, Nenya, and Vilya were the right colors, and on the right fingers.)

 The Battle of Lake Town had its moments of grandeur as Smaug strafed the town, though as everything in a Peter Jackson movie is Bigger! Better! Faster!, and because if you’ve got something made of CGI it can be as big as you like, Smaug is longer than an aircraft carrier and should be just as unstoppable.  Bard’s method of shooting him from the sky would never have worked in reality, and continued the series’ tradition of physical action that is frankly impossible.

Which brings us to the Battle of Five Pages, which is how long Tolkien takes to describe the battle in the book.  In the film, the battle lasts over an hour, which amounts to more than twelve filmed minutes per page of type.  (Bigger!  Better!  Faster!)  This is accomplished by jettisoning Tolkien’s battle and inventing a new one that, well, drags on forever.  It contains all the beats of Tolkien’s battle, with a lot more added, and more characters, and more orcs, and more eagles, which seem to be about the size of a B-47 and have enough room in their bomb bays to carry a giant were-bear.

Much of the action in the battles is physically impossible, as is so often the case in CGI-heavy action films.  To my mind, the action scenes would be far more effective and interesting if they stuck to something like physical reality, but maybe that’s just me.

Most of the additional material accomplished its purpose, which was to delay the ending of the movie so that the film wouldn’t end 45 minutes in.   There was, for instance, a lot of screen time given to a false dilemma.  (Will Thorin sulk in his palace during the final battle scene, or will he prove worthy of his ancestors and join in the fighting?   Why am I even asking this question?)  Minor characters, like King Thranduil, were provided with an arc.  (He begins the film as a bigoted snob, and after a bunch of orcs hand his ass to him, he becomes slightly less bigoted and snobby.  I’m not sure how that follows, but what the hell.)

(And incidentally, kings are about the worst-behaved people in The Hobbit.  They’re all arrogant and unpleasant.  Give Thorin a crown and he turns into a paranoid, bombastic shit.  It makes you wonder why everyone in Gondor is so happy to get a king at the end of LotR.)

Most prominent among the additions is the three-way romance between Legolas, Fili, and Tauriel the Elf-Maid, which in the third film reached its inevitable tragic finale.  Tauriel, unfortunately, turned out to be a damp squib.  She spent the Laketown battle evacuating, and the final battle knocked out of the fight, watching the boys doing all the important hacking and hewing.  Unfortunate, after the buildup she got.  Legolas, meanwhile, did his usual trick of polishing off a few hundred orcs before breakfast.)

The one addition that I thought actually worked was giving Bard a wife and children, which made the one-dimensional character from the novel more interesting, and provided different points-of-view on the climactic scene.

The previous two films were redeemed, I thought, by Martin Freeman’s marvelously humane characterization of Bilbo.  In this film his acting seemed twitchy and less heartfelt, and I found myself unmoved.

The theater was packed when I saw BotFA, but at the end there was no cheering, no happiness, no delight.  We just trudged away from the joyless theater, beaten into pudding by over two hours of relentless action.

Maybe for once the director’s cut could actually be shorter?  Ninety minutes maybe, with all the extraneous material cut out, and the focus on Bilbo?

Well, one can dream.