I’m Not The Same Hobbit I Once Was.

For those who have read The Hobbit, there was always a rather obvious joke implied by the cliffhanger ending of the second Hobbit film,The Desolation of Smaug. The dragon Smaug sweeps dreadfully down from his lonely mountain towards the defenceless city of Lake-town, and we smash-cut to black… knowing full well that the dragon would be dead at the bottom of the lake within mere moments of the start of the third film, The Battle of the Five Armies. While Peter Jackson and his team manage to draw out the suspense for a rather entertaining five minutes at the start of the picture, there’s still a large part of me that wondered if the film might open on a mere trio of shots:

EXT. SMAUG – NIGHT

EXT. LAKE TOWN – THAT MOMENT – Bard takes aim with his Black Arrow

SFX: Thwang!

Smaug dead.

I’m not just quipping here – the fate of Smaug, albeit pre-ordained by the source novel, demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the good faith / bad faith contract that this adaptation has with its own audience. Essentially, the contract is this: we expect a film to make good on its investments. In Smaug’s case, we’ve spent two whole films building him up as the supervillain of the Hobbit saga; the films have asked us to invest in that relationship, and our expectation in return is a payoff on that investment.

The climax to film two was its most magnificent dramatic peak, even if we knew the outcome; and even knowing the outcome, the opening to film three is the trilogy’s most self-absorbed joke. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final Hobbit film and the sixth (though not chronologically) Middle-Earth adaptation from Mssrs. Jackson & Co. overall, is not without its marvels, but finally and fundamentally belies the weakness at the heart of this second go-round of Jackson’s sagas.

I’ve been a Hobbit apologist across films one and two, but The Battle of the Five Armies makes me throw up my hands and admit defeat. A friend of mine is fond of saying it’s difficult to evaluate these films in parts – but if that’s true, then in like kind, it’s difficult to keep the completed picture from influencing the view of the earlier works.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies demonstrates that the material used to pad out Tolkien’s novel to generate three films (where there might more reasonably have been only two, or one), has indeed been just that: padding. Five Armies is the leanest of the Middle-Earth movies thus far (2 hours and 22 minutes, still feeling long), and it arrives at its brevity by demonstrating unequivocally that the vast majority of the characters, plots, and themes of the first two films were – like Smaug – planted for no reason, going nowhere.

This makes me feel cheated. It was always an insanity-making proposition, gathering a film around 13 dwarves and a wizard and a hobbit; but even more insanity-making would be dedicating serious time and resources in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey to imbue each of those dwarves with personalities and (in several cases) relationships with the titular hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, only to wholly abandon those characters and relationships now. With the exception of Thorin (and lovestruck Kili), the dwarves are relegated to background characters inThe Battle of the Five Armies. Bofur and Bilbo shared the most human moment in the trilogy towards the end of An Unexpected Journey, but I’d be hard-pressed to recall a single scene they share this time around; that friendship was apparently meaningless. Balin (the ever-lovely Ken Stott) and Dwalin (my personal hero, Graham McTavish) bounce off Thorin’s madness as required by the script, but everyone else is just gone.

They’re not alone. Radagast the Brown, the unexpected delight of film one, is little more than a CGI extra here. There’s a solid ten minutes ofThe Desolation of Smaug dedicated to establishing Beorn, the bear-like shapeshifter, who was intended to join the massive fray in Five Armies; here, Mikael Persbrandt’s fine, otherworldly performance is confined to a single CGI shot where the bear-man parachutes off an eagle (don’t ask) and beats up some Orcs. We are given a bitchin’ fight between the White Council and the nascent Sauron in the ruins of Dol Guldur, and then… nothing. That throughline dies about 20 minutes after Smaug.

This isn’t a frustration with the movie being untrue to its source; it’s the opposite. Why include those elements from the book at all, if they ultimately served no purpose in the adaptation as a whole? This is why, improbably, An Unexpected Journey remains the best of this lot: it’s the only film of the three that uses its source content to arrive at a functioning, self-contained story, albeit one with a “to be continued” at the end. (It’s also richly and colourfully visualized, and light in tone like its novel, a quality both Desolation and Battle lack, from their titles down.) As a completed piece, The Hobbit trilogy doesn’t weave its storylines together into a single, unified climax like The Lord of the Rings did. It carries water till it can’t be bothered any more, then drops the bucket.

These decisions suggest that this movie – and by extension, this trilogy – never really had any idea whose story they were telling, or more importantly, why they were telling it. The important characters in The Battle of the Five Armies are Bilbo, Thorin, Legolas, Tauriel, Thranduil, Gandalf, and Bard. Yes, that’s a lot. Gandalf barely qualifies as a walk-on in the events of this film; and Bard all but vanishes halfway through the battle, having proven something about how important his family is to him, I think. Everyone is spread too thin, and yet we have time for a 10-minute swordfight between Thorin and a CGI Orc on a field of CGI ice.

In the meantime, the titular Battle of the Five Armies is indeed a fine thing to see, especially in HFR, which (once you’re used to it) renders the minutely-detailed field of combat as the world’s most extraordinary Plasticine diorama and/or game of Risk. I appreciate the fact that with an eye towards the six-film cycle as a whole, Jackson has rendered a climactic brawl which, while visually spectacular enough for this trilogy, is undeniably small in scale when compared against the much larger wars of The Lord of the Rings to come. Those battles, meant to invoke the Great War of Tolkien’s youth (albeit in a completely different language) had an end-of-the-world scope; the Battle of the Five Armies is more like a rugby match gone crazy, with the spectators invading the field.

And gone crazy, it has. Five Armies’ combat is probably the most Jackson-ish to date, with heroes riding berserk war-animals (elk, pig, and most cleverly, mountain goats); saw-toothed mega-worms pulled straight out of Dune eating their way through the landscape; and a Cave Troll who actually manages to one-up the Olympic Torch Orc from The Two Towers with his single-minded fortitude. We get the definitive light-footed Legolas sequence on a crumbling bridge over a vast chasm; and Billy Connolly shows up as a Dwarf chieftain who all but walks away with the film under his belt, whistling and breaking wind.

Otherwise, the MVPs in the cast remain Luke Evans as Bard and Evangeline Lilly as Tauriel, both of whom achieve nice results in paper-thin roles that were scarcely present in the book, or not there at all. And of course, Martin Freeman as Bilbo remains an utter marvel, who is better at his role than this trilogy has any apparent use for, and who deserves better than this trilogy as a result. The lack of focus boils down most crucially on Bilbo, who seems like an observer in his own story even when he is at his most active, and whose emotional thread, due to the lack of relationships, can never be located in the crisis that unfolds.

The Battle of the Five Armies nicely demonstrated, for me, what it’s like to watch one of these movies when you don’t actively care about any of the characters. Adapting The Hobbit in the wake of The Lord of the Rings was always an impossible mission, but the failure ultimately came from a direction I didn’t expect. The Lord of the Rings carved a clean line through a difficult text and pleased its audiences by, above all, perfectly approximating the tone of its source novel.

The Hobbit films, in their effort to line directly into The Lord of the Ringsfilms, ditched their novel’s tone first and foremost, and then cut willy-nilly through a thick broth of the source novel, the Appendices, and the rough-hewn notes that the Tolkien heirs have been living off for the forty years since J.R.R.’s death. And so, with each of this trilogy’s successes has come an equal number of missed opportunities and ungainly choices – because ultimately, the book is remembered as childlike fun, and the movies will never be. At the end of the journey, it’s as simple as this: they solved The Lord of the Rings, which was long thought unsolvable; and they never solved The Hobbit, which everyone assumed would be a walk in the park.

Afterword: Battle Of The Five Armies, Extended Edition (November 21 2015)

One last surprise in the decade-and-a-half saga of Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies, the Extended Edition of THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES is a substantial improvement upon the theatrical cut. A nice example of the truism that a longer, better edit of a movie can paradoxically make the film feel shorter while watching it, the E.E. doesn’t solve all the problems of the concluding chapter of the Hobbit trilogy – how could it? – but at least manages to deliver on the core value proposition of a movie called THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES: it actually makes the eponymous battle something worth building a film around.

I wonder what the production realities were here: did Jackson just deliver the shorter cut to theatres to fulfill the basic requirements of his mandate, i.e. CGI battleporn for an hour, after an hour of lacklustre political build-up? Had he not “solved” the sequence yet, or did he just cut it off at the knees? Either way, the battle feels like a fully-realized cinematic story now, not just computers fighting computers. Motivations are better constructed. Strategies become clearer. Characters (who were in many cases completely removed from the theatrical cut) are kept in play and, in so doing, answer a lot of my principal problems with BOTFA in the first place: that after spending nearly 7 hours arriving at this point, the theatrical film seemed to short-sheet almost all of the character elaborations and investment that we were lead to presume were going somewhere in films 1 & 2.

If the result is still a bit like watching the role-playing nerds from your high school play a really elaborate game of RISK, the full sequence is nonetheless full of so much more entertainment value – that “Peter Jackson-ness” recalling DEAD ALIVE, rather than THE LOVELY BONES – that it’s an absolute hoot to watch. Plus, having finally found the spine of the story, the pacing works in the service of the story, building and releasing tension over and over again instead of just milling through 45 minutes of undifferentiated hack-and-slash. Emphases are in the right place: believe it or not, there are a few seconds more Legolas in this version, and yet for the first time, he doesn’t feel like he’s taking over the lion’s share of the narrative for no other reason than that the director thinks he’s cool, because the other characters are given equal, or greater, screen time.

The Hobbit trilogy was, as has become increasingly clear, boned from the get-go, a victim of not enough time, wildly over-amped expectations, and some cause-and-effect decision making that created problems that couldn’t ultimately be solved. Nonetheless, the project feels a lot less like a failure with this version of the third film as its capper. It’ll never be THE LORD OF THE RINGS – but then, it never should have been, either. While no HOBBIT film is competing in anything like the same category of achievement as the LOTR films, the nicest thing the revised cut of BOTFA did for me was giving me my whole Middle-Earth experience back. I guess I hadn’t realized how much leaving the saga on such a sour note last Christmas had bummed me out.

Without really planning on it, I’ve watched 5 of the 6 Middle-Earth films over the course of the past 2 weeks, and I’m impressed by how soundly and successfully they really do fit together – reaching backwards and forwards through the narrative to inform scenes and themes in different ways. It’s a far better job of “rhyming” than George Lucas’s effort with the Star Wars prequels, but more than that I was amazed by how cohesive the whole set is… if not quite aesthetically (transitioning from the super-digital BOTFA to the almost charmingly analog FOTR is not the most successful bridges of scale), then certainly story-wise.

The one exception is this: in watching LOTR again this month, it becomes painfully clear how badly Orlando Bloom screwed up his reprise of Legolas. It bears remembering that Bloom, in the LOTR trilogy, was actually quite good: naive, charismatic, and visibly otherworldly in his reactions to human normalcies like “death” and “caves.” He represented all of Elvendom on the Fellowship, just like Gimli represented the dwarves; and his performance set a tone for that world that carried a lot of the fantasy of that trilogy of films.

In his 2 HOBBIT films, Bloom is a surly, racist, muscular killing machine who, in a greater sin than anything else I can name, seems decades – or even centuries, by Elven standards – older than he does in the “later” films. It’s the sort of gaffe I’m sort of surprised was allowed to go through, except that for whatever reason Jackson & Co. seemed to see Bloom as their celebrity guest-star this time around, and apparently didn’t work on his performance or character arc beyond “he’s in the movie = it’s good.”

Regardless: Middle-Earth is whole again. That means a lot to me.