New Zealand | Celluloid Paradiso

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

April 8, 2020April 8, 2020André Crous

Thirteen years after Peter Jackson’s first Tolkien film, his sixth offers little proof he has matured as a filmmaker.

USA/New Zealand
3.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 140 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Desolation of Smaug

With the release of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies, the sixth and hopefully the last film in Peter Jackson’s canon of J.R.R. Tolkien productions, the New Zealand director has proved decisively that he is not so much a storyteller as he is a choreographer, or more particularly an orchestrator of epic spectacle. He trains his focus on presenting and overwhelming the viewer with the larger-than-life world where the magnificent story is set, but the way in which the characters behave or appear is often riddled with clichés that speak of his immaturity as a teller of tales or a director of actors.

Such an assessment may sound harsh and unjustified, especially because Jackson’s name, in connection with the world of Middle-earth, rouses much admiration for his ability to use or create a vast canvas filled with battles and wizards that seem part of a familiar reality rather than a fantasy. This third instalment is the best of the Hobbit trilogy, but as a whole, these three films are surprisingly disappointing in comparison with his work on The Lord of the Rings, released 2001–03.

The reasons for this are legion and range from the quality and scale of the books themselves to the much-criticised approach of breaking the short novel (The Hobbit) into three separate films. But what is particularly irksome is the almost soap-opera acting in the director’s most recent works.

From characters looking off into the distance as they digest bad news (the elves, in particular, are prone to such conduct, and sometimes the camera tracks in on their faces for even greater emphasis) to histrionic displays of emotion (e.g. the face-pulling that Bain, the son of Lake-town’s Bard, engages in), there is plenty of theatrics to undermine our suspension of disbelief. And the less said about the corrupt councillor, Alfrid, who is an odious fellow that ultimately dresses up in women’s clothing and scampers off with gold coins in his voluptuous bosom, supposedly intended as a source of comedy, the better.

As the title indicates, a giant battle is central to this final part of The Hobbit. It takes place at the Lonely Mountain, where the Dwarves, along with the Elves and the humans, have little time to celebrate the departure of the dragon Smaug, as they soon face hordes of Orcs and Wargs that seek to capitalise on the mountain’s strategic position and the riches that remain inside it.

Smaug, which lent its name to the second instalment, is killed off very early on in the film, and this death firmly establishes Bard’s significance and determination. Played by Luke Evans, this character is a mixture of emotion and bravery, but the actor ensures there is never any doubt about the character’s commitment to justice, and unlike some of the others, we can always take him seriously.

One would expect a film with a sub-title like “Battle of the Five Armies” to be about bloodshed and courage, but while there are such moments involving the two main characters, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), it is in fact more about friendship, loyalty and understanding than anything else. More to the point, it is about the necessity of living together in harmony, avoiding the dark side and allowing others to love whomever they choose. The sentiment is sincere, but Jackson’s attempts to make these ideas visible in his story are overblown.

He handles the relationship between Kíli the Dwarf and Tauriel the Elf slightly better than was the case in The Desolation of Smaug, only because these two spend very little time together. However, the back story to Elvenking Thranduil’s objections to Tauriel’s love offers only superficial psychological insights into his character that culminate in embarrassing final heart-to-hearts between him and his son, Legolas, and him and Tauriel. (He acknowledges he was wrong about the purity of her love when he utters the cringeworthy statement, “It hurts because it was real.”)

And for the most part, Jackson is content to keep using the same cinematic language he used in The Lord of the Rings more than a decade ago to render spirits. He also still clearly enjoys employing slow motion as often as possible. His aerial shots are used somewhat more judiciously than in Smaug, but when it comes to the photography of vast vistas framed on either side by steep mountainsides, we get the feeling of déjà vu.

The world the director depicts can be the same without him having to revert to the same shots and same framing he used on previous outings. Jackson’s back projection in some of his scenes is just terrible, and the composition of the shots is generally the same: Gandalf on a horse, or Legolas hanging onto a cave bat, shot from up close and well lit, with the fuzzy and more sombre background in motion behind them. One would never guess this is the most expensive trilogy in motion picture history: This film alone reportedly cost $250 million, or around $1.7 million a minute.

The titular battle, which starts exactly at the halfway mark and lasts for most of the rest of the film, is not nearly as impressively staged as Jackson’s all-time great, the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers, because he focuses too strenuously on Thorin’s development from being a power-hungry king to proving his friendship with Bilbo. And despite the 145-minute running time, there are major gaps in the narrative, especially regarding the movements of Bard during this battle.

As with Return of the King, the ending takes a while and could have been much shorter, because the screenplay keeps dropping intertextual references to Jackson’s earlier trilogy that seek to dovetail this story with the other one. Poor Bilbo returns from his adventure a whimpering, stuttering mess filled with emotion, a sight we certainly could have been spared.

While the best (and, thankfully, the shortest) of the trilogy, The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies underlines what should have been obvious by now: Peter Jackson has substantial imagination and obviously enough technical know-how to conjure a world of wonder, but he lacks the ability to tell his stories without reverting to the most banal narrative clichés. Moreover, his actors are more or less left to their own (all too often defective) devices. The film will make a generous profit despite its astronomical budget, and filmmakers like James Cameron will likely follow the same path of simplifying their stories while maximising the visuals of the world they offer for the viewer’s consumption.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

April 8, 2020April 8, 2020André Crous

In The Desolation of Smaug, the second Hobbit instalment, Peter Jackson takes an unfortunate page from Spielberg’s book.

USA/New Zealand
3*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 160 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– An Unexpected Journey
– The Battle of the Five Armies

When the first film in the Hobbit trilogy was released, everyone kept talking about the disproportionate length of the films (totalling around nine hours) compared with the size of the source text, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 300-page novel. If War and Peace could be made into a three-hour film, what prevented Jackson from producing a film length commensurate with the size of his story?

It doesn’t take an outsized intellect to recognise financial considerations playing an important role here, and one would expect that, if anyone could entertain us for such an extended period of time, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson would be the man for the job. But just as The Hobbit precedes the story contained in The Lord of the Rings, so too does this current batch of films seem to be the work of a much less experienced director.

Because this second instalment of The Hobbit, titled The Desolation of Smaug, is the second film of a three-part series, we cannot have expected there to be much to get excited about, as it functions mostly as a bridge between the first and last parts of the story. But the same was true of the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, and yet Jackson used majestic battle scenes and spectacular locations to his advantage to keep our attention.

Very little happens in Smaug, at least until the very end, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and the dwarfs reach the Lonely Mountain (Erebor), where Smaug the dragon has lain in a chamber full of gold ever since he chased out the dwarfs, to whose kingdom he had laid waste. For the most part, we are on a journey with the dozen characters as they travel through Mirkwood Forest, arrive at Lake-town thanks to a complicated and conflicted widower and cross Long Lake to Erebor, where Bilbo is charged with stealing the Arkenstone gem from Smaug. On a parallel track, we see Gandalf the Grey’s realisation that he and his companions are up against something much more evil than they had anticipated.

But our unease with this film has as much to do with the thin storyline – once more spread over some two hours and 40 minutes – as it does with the embarrassingly amateurish presentation of romance onscreen.

We can all remember the weepy relationship between Frodo and Samwise in The Return of the King; in Smaug, the focus is on Kíli the Dwarf (Aidan Turner), the nephew of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), heir to the throne, and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a female elf from Mirkwood who is the object of Elven Prince Legolas’ affections. In the film, at any rate, Kíli certainly stands out among his band of brothers as he is the only dwarf without a beard, and when he and his fellow dwarfs are taken prisoner by Elvenking Thranduil, Legolas’ father, he immediately hits it off with Tauriel.

This initial attraction, in no way hidden, will quickly lead to the two swooning over each other. Jackson, for all his filmmaking prowess, simply cannot resist the temptation to go melodramatic on us. When Kíli is struck by a poisoned arrow in the thigh, it is up to Tauriel to rub the healing herb into his flesh while intoning a spell, and when Kíli looks up at her, would you believe, she seems to shimmer with a blinding angelic light. It is difficult not to laugh, as we get unfortunate flashbacks to the worst film in the Jackson canon, his calamitous The Lovely Bones from 2009.

Jackson’s camera also flies all over the place, often making us nauseous when a wild helicopter shot is inserted between much calmer visuals. For the director, it would seem that “coverage” implies catapulting his machinery in every direction and using that footage whenever he needs to cut away from someone for a brief moment. Reckless track-ins, especially in one of the opening scenes, in the Prancing Pony inn in Bree, are also tiresome because their use speaks to Jackson’s apparent inability to come up with creative solutions to creating tension – in this case, to suggest the potential dangers around Thorin.

One truly adventurous scene, however, occurs during the dwarfs’ escape from Mirkwood: At one point, the camera seems to be floating on the wild river and pans from side to side as one of the dwarfs rolls around in a barrel, mowing down the Orcs on the riverbank as he careers full-speed across the river bends. It is a breathtakingly choreographed bit of action, all in a single take, thoroughly reminiscent of the epic single-take chase scene in the Jackson-produced, Steven Spielberg–directed The Adventures of Tintin.

Smaug may be Bilbo’s tale, but it belongs entirely to the titular dragon, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is much more clever than he appears to be, and while he certainly poses a threat to the existence of all in Middle-earth – and the glint in his eye looks almost exactly like Sauron – we cannot help but respect his intelligence and even his wiliness, and Cumberbatch’s work here is mesmerizing.

While Smaug isn’t at the same level as Jackson’s three films from the beginning of the millennium, and despite the often amateurish representation of romance or infatuation, it is certainly an improvement on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and time goes by more quickly (that might be because the film is nearly 20 minutes shorter than its predecessor).

Unfortunately, Bilbo is not as active as we would like him to be, and he all but completely disappears from view in the Lake-town scenes. After we had lost Gandalf in The Two Towers, he reappeared towards the end with reinforcements at Helm’s Deep and provided one of the most memorable moments of that extraordinary film. But by the end of Smaug, Bilbo has done so little that we forget about him, and the film literally leaves him hanging – in a cage at Dol Guldur, where he discovers the Necromancer.

The Desolation of Smaug showcases little of the imagination we have come to associate with Jackson and his previous depictions of Middle-earth. At times Spielbergian with his sentimentality, here he rarely awes us with the breadth of his vision. The scenes with Bilbo or Smaug – and especially with the two of them – are marvellous, and so is an early scene with giant spiders, but overall it would seem Jackson has lost his Midas touch.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

April 8, 2020April 8, 2020André Crous

Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit is faithful to the novel, but the epic length of this three-part production is unjustified.

USA/New Zealand
2.5*

Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie

Running time: 165 minutes

This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Desolation of Smaug
– The Battle of the Five Armies

During the 10 years that elapsed between the making of the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the three films that compose the The Hobbit trilogy, it was unthinkable that anyone other than Peter Jackson could do justice to the original novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackson had created a landmark piece of cinema that melded a vast array of special effects, motion-capture technology and epic storytelling to produce films that were held together by a very strong story and dazzled us with some remarkable set pieces in the genres of adventure, drama, fantasy and war.

Perhaps it is true that Jackson was the only person who could have made The Hobbit at the same level as the Lord of the Rings films, but it is a pity he wasn’t aiming higher. In his previous trilogy, he pulled together a disparate group of individuals – four hobbits, a dwarf, an Elf, a wizard and two humans – with a dynamic sense of tension, action and friendship.

The Hobbit doesn’t reach the same level of excitement or provoke the same interest. At the beginning of the film, we see the dwarf kingdom prosper before being attacked and evicted from their own treasure-filled mountain, Erebor, by the dragon Smaug. Shortly afterwards, Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellen) knocks on the door of Bilbo Baggins’s (Martin Freeman) door in Hobbiton and manages to convince him, with some reverse psychology courtesy of a horde of dwarves – who raid his pantry – led by heir apparent Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), to join in the journey back to Erebor, somehow slay the dragon and win them their kingdom back.

In this sense, the story resembles, in broad strokes, the quest of the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings; however, the group is by no means as interesting as in the other films. This weak spot greatly impedes our engagement in the social fabric, despite magisterial efforts by Freeman.

But there is at least one marked difference between the narrative structures of the two series. Whereas The Lord of the Rings was told entirely in the present tense, except for that exquisite prologue narrated by Cate Blanchett in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit is framed as a story written by the old Bilbo to his nephew Frodo. The cuts back to him, 60 years after the events, which for those who haven’t seen the other films or read the books spoils the story by revealing he survived the ordeal, border on the tedious, and Frodo’s appearance here also seems more like a cameo than a necessity.

There is little variety in terms of the storyline and its different groupings of characters, but the film reaches a high point when Bilbo is separated from the group of dwarves, finds the One Ring and plays a game of riddles with Gollum. Gollum, even more than Gandalf or any of the elves, is the one character from The Lord of the Rings whom we are really glad to see again, and every minute spent in his company is electric with tension and expectation.

There is one aspect of the film, however, that is groundbreaking, and this deserves to be mentioned in every review. Films are usually recorded and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. That is the minimum amount of frames necessary to render a moving image that doesn’t suffer from the stuttering movements of early cinema. With The Hobbit, Jackson collected double the data and had many of the prints projected at 48 frames per second, a process that is called High Frame Rate, or HFR, coupled with 3-D effects.

The result is distracting as we are confronted with twice the amount of data as usual, and while things move at a more “natural” speed, it nonetheless seems to be too fast. It is effectively high-definition images, and with the three dimensions, rendered here more strikingly than in any other film this reviewer has ever seen, all pretense of fiction seems to disappear.

But, ironically, that is a problem. While the quest for so-called realism in the cinema is important for the viewer to feel somehow part of the action, there is a difference between feeling like you’re there and feeling like it’s reality.

Middle-earth is a realm of fantasy, and any illusion that the creatures are almost “real” will be easily rejected by the viewer, creating a barrier to our investment in the events, or feeling of being present.

Maybe it is merely a question of getting used to the HFR – it will almost certainly be used in the future – but this new technology would seem to benefit a documentary film much more than one set in a fictional fantasy land.

The two-dimensional version is much more palatable, and the same will be true of the 3-D version screened at the conventional 24 frames per second. In terms of tone and story, this first film, whose running time of 165 minutes is pure self-indulgence (the entire series is based on a book that is one-third as long as the Lord of the Rings supertome), is far from the success one had expected from Jackson.