There's a moment of utter preposterousness which occurs near the end of the Peter Jackon's "Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" which highlights the sheer ridiculousness of Warner Brother's decision (informed, I can only assume, by the allure of box office receipts) to split this slim book into three huge films. Two characters, I won't name who so as to avoid spoilers, have just had a twenty minute fight, replete with the "he's dead, HE ISN'T, he's dead, HE ISN'T!" beats every two minutes or so. Finally, the scene decides to end, and one character falls from a height which would DEFINITELY kill him. Then, just so we know this isn't a false death like the many that have preceded it, we see a huge rock fall and hit them. Splat. We get it.
I laughed, against myself, because it's just a ludicrous piece of film-making in a ludicrous saga, which has no good reason being this long. The plot itself has enough meat, perhaps, for two 90 minute films or one very fast-paced 150 minute film. It concerns a quest to a mountain which has been taken over by a dragon, Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch); that's it. But where the previous Lord of the Rings films (of which I am a fan) had a plot that was similarly simple, but embellished by a fierce sense of place, this film just drags, because the extraneous elements feel shoehorned in, as opposed to part of this world of awe and wonder.
There's just no sense of urgency. Characters stall and dither and shoot the breeze and make grandiose statements in big booming voices and reflect on the Terrible Nature of the events which have just occurred, and it amounts to piteously little. Elements which could have been nice emotional bookends on a smaller film, such as Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman)'s borderline homo-erotic friendship with dwarf Thorin (Richard Armitage) are here treated as if they carry the emotional heft of Bizet's Carmen. It's as stagnant a film as you can imagine seeing, and that's surprising when you consider that the title literally acts as a complete plot synopsis. It's a battle. There are five armies. There's a lot of bodice-tearing braggadocio and battlefield proclamations (which grow quite comical by the end).
Oh, there's so much to pick apart. The sound design was unusually woeful for a production of this heft; various scenes had dialogue when the characters' mouths weren't moving, the battle sounds felt like they'd been pulled from a child's sword/shield/helmet playset, and the whole film had a vague "you're watching this underwater", subdued quality to it. Even Ian McKellen's legendary wizard Gandalf, one of the most recognisable figures in modern day popular culture, is completely wasted, spending the first half of the film in a cage and the second half of the film commenting on the battle and strolling around.
If there's one saving grace, I suppose, it's that whilst the film is long (144 minutes for one battle and some moping) it doesn't quite hit the gross exorbitance of the last film in the trilogy, "The Desolation of Smaug", a 161 orgy of needless narrative excess and, on the record, one of the most boring films ever made. This film is, narratively, a complete whitewash- I cannot stress this enough, ONE BATTLE, SOME MOPING- but at least it wasn't as bad as one of the dullest films I've ever seen.
Small potatoes.
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