Sunday, December 21, 2014

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
Rated PG-13 (beheadings and 'splosions)
Directed by: Peter Jackson
Written by: Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro (Screenplay), J.R.R. Tolkien (Novel, "The Hobbit")
**1/2 out of ****

You have no excuses to not know this story. None. If you didn't see "The Lord of The Rings", you are a liar, and if you didn't read "The Hobbit", you had an awful childhood that should have been rectified by this point.

I'm not going to recount the story, really. It's in the damn subtitle. There's a battle, and it involves five armies. Also, a dragon.

I know that Jackson and company added some characters and changed a few details, but, overall, the adaptation is fairly faithful. And yet, only 2 1/2 stars.

The acting is fine. You couldn't have found a better actor to play a young Bilbo Baggins. Richard Armitage is a handsome, brooding King Under the Mountain. There are other dwarves and people, but... Well, let's let Bilbo say what the problem is.

"I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread."

That's basically the problem with "The Hobbit" trilogy. It shouldn't have been one. It should have been two movies - The Shire to The Desolation of Smaug, and then The Battle of the Five Armies. Gandalf vs. The Witch King of Angmar should be a separate movie all together.

And, sadly, Peter Jackson had to make the movies. He didn't even want to in the first place. Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro were on the short-list to helm it, but, due to lawsuits and licensing taking forever, del Toro wound up dropping out because he had other productions to deal with. (One of which was "Pacific Rim", so, I'm not too sad.)

You can feel that Jackson's heart simply wasn't in these. Especially in the first two, not so much in this one, but, that's because character building has already happened, and now it's time for the payoff.

From a technical standpoint, wow. Just seeing how much technology has progressed since LOTR is stunning. There did seem to be some strange frame-rate or resolution issues going on, however. The battles were huge, and had even better choreography than in the original trilogy, but, they felt less intimate. Faramir trying to save Osgiliath was brutal, but felt intimate.  Thorin and some other dwarves (seriously, there were too damn many dwarves, and didn't have strong enough personalities for me to tell which was which. There was Old Beard, Time Bandit Hat, Baldy McTattoo, Braided Beard, Young Handsome Dwarf, and I'm sure several others.) taking on orcs was equally brutal, and even better visually, but, meh. Even with beheadings, it just lacked the emotional heft.

Is this movie bad? No. Far from it. It's just... I'm sure Jackson is tired, and would REALLY like to move on.