Tag: Richard Armitage

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The “epic” conclusion to Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” trilogy is hardly as epic as it purports.

TheHobbitPosterIt’s all come down to this. We’ve arrived There and Back Again in the most epic trilogy ever put to film, yes? “The Hobbit” is such a dense and important story that it absolutely had to be spread out across three films. Surely one movie is not good enough for one book? If so, is “The Battle of the Five Armies” the monumental finale you’ve been waiting for? Are you not entertained?

Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit” franchise has been the most lumbering, ponderous, self-important and at the same time eye-rollingly lame collection of films. “An Unexpected Journey” was laughably cartoonish, featuring dwarf singing, trolls scratching their asses and a goblin with a scrotum dangling from his chin. “The Desolation of Smaug” was frustratingly pointless, both so over-plotted in exposition and yet under-plotted in creating a story with actual substance. And each film, shot in 3D and high frequency 48 Frames Per Second, has looked awful: fake, too bright, and plain un-cinematic.

Was there a question that “The Battle of the Five Armies” would turn this around? This third entry may be the least bad in the franchise, but now it is drowning in portentous overtones of war, conflict and impending doom on the horizon. Jackson continues to underutilize his main character, i.e. the actual Hobbit in “The Hobbit”, and loses focus on elves, orcs, dwarves and weasel humans who won’t die or disappear. It’s as overstuffed a film as any of the previous, and it’s oh so long.

“The Desolation of Smaug” ended on an unfortunate cliffhanger, with the dragon Smaug being unleashed from his mountain lair by the clan of dwarves, only to be set loose upon the simple human city of Laketown. That’s where “The Battle of the Five Armies” picks up, but it’s a perplexing way to start the film. Not only does the abrupt opening lose its suspense and excitement, Jackson can’t pull himself away from the many human characters making their escape, including the insufferable comic relief Alfrid, the snively coward of a human always inserting himself into otherwise serious sequences.

Even once the dragon is slayed things don’t quite get moving. Jackson then jumps away to provide a teaser to the original “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, a distraction that’s little more than fan service in which Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Galadriel and Saurumon battle holograms of I’m not sure what.

What their meeting does explain is that now that Smaug has been slayed, all of Middle Earth will be coming to the mountain to claim the riches inside and its militaristically strategic location. As a result, the dwarves have barricaded themselves inside, still looking for the priceless stone that serves as a symbol for a leader’s rise to power. Bilbo (Martin Freeman) found it at the end of “The Desolation of Smaug” but now is reluctant to turn it over to Thorin (Richard Armitage) after seeing how the pursuit of it has driven him mad with power.

But the bluster Jackson musters seems misplaced. Thorin is king of nothing and these dozen dwarves amid five armies of thousands of elves, humans, and orcs seem to amount to a hill of beans. Yet still they chatter on endlessly about war, and only Bilbo avoids speaking his dialogue with an air of self-importance. One still wishes the film were about Bilbo and his growth more so than the MacGuffins and the gigantic battles.

Just like his plot exposition, Jackson has taken orchestrating CGI mayhem to a new level. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) executes a stunt here so laughably impossible that it’s plain brilliant on Jackson’s part. Legolas has knocked over a tower to create a makeshift bridge positioned perfectly between two mountain cliffs. In a fight with an orc leader atop it, it all starts to slowly collapse. Legolas then bounds (or perhaps glides is more accurate) up one stone at a time, each falling in a stepping stone pattern, which gives him enough time to jump on top of his opponent, then to safety, leading the orc to fall to his doom.

An isolated sequence like that, however absurd, is an example of the creativity Jackson still has and his ability to create a memorable moment of action filmmaking. I attest that out of all nine hours of footage across three movies, there is one truly great “Hobbit” film to be seen here. For how bloated and long this last installment continues to grow, “The Battle of the Five Armies” is not it.

2 ½ stars

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The second Hobbit film remains as meandering and as inconsequential as the first.

The first “Hobbit” film was needlessly long, padded with backstory, cameos and Easter eggs into a cartoony, rehashed bore. Peter Jackson’s devotion to his source material just seemed like indulgence the first time around. With “The Desolation of Smaug” however, Jackson has turned that obsession into a Wikipedia entry.

This second “Hobbit” film is so devoid of actual ideas or substance that it is not merely a meandering middle film without a proper beginning or ending, but it stands to be about nothing at all. It is so obsessed with its own plot details that “The Desolation of Smaug” becomes a litany of portentous prophecies, stern warnings and untrusting conversations between various species and creeds.

The film doesn’t so much pick up where the last one left off but drops us in a new CGI playground. First they outrun the orcs still chasing them, then they escape the spiders in a mystical forest, then they escape the elves holding them captive, and finally they evade the humans somehow bent on arresting them. Eventually they will reach the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) that was merely hyped in the first film, only setting up what is now prepared to be a three hour long battle sequence in “The Hobbit: There and Back Again.”

Missing from all of this is a sense of purpose and a set of values. Gone are the words of wisdom from Gandalf (Ian McKellen), who sidelines himself for much of the movie, or even the cheeky riddles and split personalities from everyone’s favorite Gollum, here replaced by Smaug to only recite more threats about how the dwarves will never reclaim their home.

What he has added (because even Jackson is not averse to fan fiction) is mightily slim. Legolas (Orlando Bloom) returns mostly for stylish, Elvish beheadings of orcs, but he’s also caught in a love triangle between the new elf maiden Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the dwarf Kili (Aiden Turner). This drama is as manufactured and stiff as the elves. It introduces a woman and an extra archer into the mayhem and little else. Continue reading “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Let “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” be a lesson to those thinking of adapting a novel to the screen. “An Unexpected Journey” is the first of three movies spread out over the next two years designed to retell J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” a children’s book and prequel to the Lord of the Rings series.

As it stands, Peter Jackson has made a lumbering, long, familiar and padded opening to a trilogy that I fear is equally as bloated. It falls prey to nerd-baiting, deciding the best way to adapt a novel is to be brutally faithful to the source, shoe-horning in meandering details and piddling small talk that do nothing to make the characters interesting or attempt to surpass the level of spectacle found in Jackson’s original LOTR franchise.

All this has little to do with Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” itself. Yes, it is a different story altogether, one that is more whimsical, lighter in tone and not as dense of a mythological tome. But “An Unexpected Journey” finds Jackson basically making a grandly proportioned cartoon, not least of all helped by the fact that in 3-D and 48 frames per second it looks like one (more on that later).

A far stretch from the visceral, but bloodless action of the original trilogy, here we see dwarves leaping and dangling from trees, trolls scratching their butts, giant rock titans fighting Transformers style and talking orcs that look like they have scrotums dangling from their chins. It’s chaotic, nonsensical action befitting a Dreamworks kids movie, not fantastical, just a CGI maelstrom that defies logic.

All of this somehow seems familiar. The initial journey from the Shire followed by set pieces across New Zealand mountains and on to Rivendell: we’ve been to all these places before, and none of it is as fresh or spectacular.

They feel obligatory, because neither Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) nor the 12 dwarves he’s accompanying have much of a purpose for this quest; they’re just on an adventure.

Take Bilbo, who we get to know by watching him say “Don’t eat that” and “That’s an antique” over and over to the oafish dwarves who have without warning invaded his house and begun eating his food. He’s been informed through a lengthy backstory and obligatory flashback battle sequence that these 12 dwarves are embarking on a quest to reclaim their home, Erebor, from a dragon called Smaug. In order to do so, they need a stealthy hobbit who can sneak past Smaug. And after just a little prodding, he chooses to go because the plot needs to move forward.

But Bilbo doesn’t even really have much to do for a solid hour or more. He virtually disappears from sight amongst all the chases, flashbacks and side plots. His part involves cracking wise in front of some dumb trolls and of course Gollum (Andy Serkis, as deliciously funny and expressive in his motion capture ware as ever), which don’t really get the dwarves any closer to Erebor, but they’re supposed to be fun or funny I guess.

If this really is a faithful adaptation of the novel, the dialogue is awfully reductive and hardly literary. Much of it is low-brow and silly, but every once and a while Gandalf (Ian McKellen) has a fortune cookie line about bravery and the movie can call itself epic and profound.

There’s so much that feels weird and half-baked about “The Hobbit,” but most of all it just doesn’t look cinematic. 48 fps is designed to reduce the amount of strobing and blurring effects typically seen as the camera is quickly panning or tracking, and this can be very noticeable when watching a movie in 3-D. You’d arguably want this when you’re watching sports or other live TV. The typical line is that it’s “like looking through a window.”

But if everything in your movie is computer generated or you place your actors in front of movie sets, everything you see through that window is going to look fake. The movie is bursting with unnecessary amounts of light, the CGI looks strangely cheap, and the characters look like cardboard cutouts in front of a backdrop. If the blurring problem has gone away, it now looks like objects are awkwardly brushing up against the frame.

These have been comments that critics have made against 3-D itself for the longest time, and now Jackson has almost willfully amplified those problems for the sake of “accuracy.” It reflects the broader problem of “An Unexpected Journey,” which is that faithfulness to “reality” or to “source material” does not intrinsically make for a compelling movie.

2 stars