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| Martin Freeman as Bilbo in the last part of Peter Jackson's Hobbit adaptation. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar |
And so, in the end, we find ourselves once again at the beginning, having travelled there and back again in the company of elves, dwarves, dragons and hobbits – a journey which started 13 years (and more than 17 screen-hours) ago with the unveiling of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in December 2001. Back then, the scope and scale of Peter Jackson’s visual imagination was breathtaking. Animators like Ralph Bakshi had taken a crack at Tolkien’s weighty tomes before, but Jackson was making game-changing use of computer graphics to blur the line between the “real” and the “imagined”. Having never cared for the source novels, I found myself wholly transported to Middle-earth, swept away by the sheer cinematic force of Jackson’s vision. How long ago that all seems now.
Like the Star Wars prequels, the Hobbit movies were always destined to disappoint. Originally slated for direction as a two-parter by Pan’s Labyrinth maestro Guillermo del Toro, the series returned to Jackson’s helmsmanship following lengthy production delays, and promptly expanded into a trilogy via the addition of extraneous appendices and gender-balancing new characters (viz Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel). Yet like the haunted Thorin Oakenshield (a Shakespearean Richard Armitage), who spends much of this final movie holed up beneath the Lonely Mountain, bedazzled by an undulating sea of gold, one wonders whether the purity of Jackson’s original quest hasn’t been lost amid the series’ shiny success. Fans of the first two Hobbit movies may not be disappointed by this final instalment, which offers few departures from the formula of yore, but those who remember the risks Jackson took with Bad Taste, Braindead, Heavenly Creatures and even his King Kong reboot may find themselves wishing for more than just more of the same.
We open with a spectacular pre-credits set piece in which the enraged dragon Smaug – once again voiced by a lizard-tongued Benedict Cumberbatch – lays siege to Lake-town, raining fire from the heavens. It’s a bravura curtain-raiser, an air-raid orchestrated with a dynamic skill which suggests that Jackson’s long-nurtured Dam Busters remake won’t be short on blitzy spectacle. As buildings burn and innocents falter, Lake-town’s greasy Master (Stephen Fry) attempts to make off with the loot, introducing a note of humour to the carnage (“if only we could save more people, but they’re just not worth it”), selling his soul down the river as Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) strikes out with his righteous arrows.
Sadly, little that follows can hold a candle to that kinetic opener. While the second Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug, largely dispensed with the endless tea-party pootlings of opener An Unexpected Journey to serve up a succession of fairground thrill-rides, Five Armies has more than its fair share of elaborately tressed actors reciting lumpen expository or emotional dialogue while brooding CGI landscapes roll endlessly in the background. It doesn’t help that Jackson shoots every meeting with a panoramic swirl which accentuates the virtual artifice; although once hailed as a potential successor to David Lean, Jackson’s cinematic instincts are here singly overshadowed by a computer game aesthetic. Even the more action-packed moments suffer from a superfluity of weightless runny-jumpy-stabby action better suited to Assassin’s Creed, although a scene in which one of our many heroes leaps unfeasibly atop tumbling rocks makes him look less like Ezio than Super Mario; I half expected him to gather spinning gold coins en route. As for the titular final conflict, despite an abundance of goblins, trolls, bats, eagles and massive Dune/Tremors-style worms, it’s no Battle of Helm’s Deep. Yes, there’s a lovely Kurosawa moment when the elves leap in formation over the shielded ranks of dwarves, catching their attackers unaware. But elsewhere, despite the much vaunted “darkness” of this finale, it’s a succession of clanging and banging that continues for what seems like an eternity – only without the sense of history in the making.
Read more
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/dec/14/the-hobbit-battle-five-armies-review-middling-finale-middle-earth
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