Out of the trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the hottest mess for a number of reasons. That’s a real shame because the ending of the novel has always been satisfying to me. The effort to extend one book into three movies resulted in the final installment being stuffed with the most embellishments to the point it became a mere shadow of the original text.
Looking Back at The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
There are some things I appreciate about the movie, although that list is far shorter than what I don’t like, sadly. At least the lesson of the corrupting power of greed is retained, although I feel all the spectacles crammed into the film work to push that lesson into a small fraction of screen time. It’s a travesty, in my opinion.
As for the depiction of Gandalf and the White Council expelling the Necromancer from Dol Guldur, I have mixed feelings. In the book, the event is mentioned by Gandalf in passing, as if it were merely a trifle. Perhaps the wizard was just trying to not weigh Bilbo down by describing just how serious the task was.
Because it’s not portrayed in the novel, some thought it was an entirely invented sequence from Peter Jackson’s imagination. It wasn’t, but the inclusion of the Nazgul as well as how the assault on the ancient fortress by the White Council went down were dreamt up by the filmmakers. According to Tolkien, the Council never faced the Necromancer directly, who fled, and so they didn’t know his identity, only that he was evil and powerful. But in the movie even the Eye of Sauron makes an appearance, which is just too much. Likely that was done to help viewers connect the two characters, but it smacks too much of on-the-nose dialogue where all subtlety is ditched and the audience is treated like dumb kids who can’t put anything together for themselves.
Looking Back at The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The final battle itself was also embellished, which annoyed me to no end. After all, it was just fine how it was portrayed in the book and would’ve played well on the screen, or so I think. In the movie, the motivation for the orcs marching on Erebor isn’t just the motivation of the dragon’s treasure, like how Tolkien wrote it. Instead, Jackson contrives this whole genocidal plot that’s too parallel to The Two Towers. The plot of The Hobbit doesn’t accomodate such stakes, so it comes off as silly and too much.
How the orcs appear with the were-worms tunneling underground is one of the most ridiculous elements of the movie. The fantastical creatures are only mentioned in passing in the book and supposedly live in the deserts to the east. Jackson was obviously hungry for a spectacle, my guess was to mirror the awe people felt at the oliphaunts in Return of the King, but instead he achieves making the sequence look almost comical.
While it’s not the strongest one of the trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is entertaining enough, especially compared with so much garbage that’s been put out more recently.
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures
Steven Symes 