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.