Review of The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

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.

Review of X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

The X-Men saga has been running for 14 years now and remains notable, in my eyes, for being the only superhero franchise to actually care about. It’s developed a solid bedrock of characters, it actually has an inner core and message, there’s an appropriate level of subtext, and, crucially, the films remember to be good fun. This was exemplified in the best of the lot, 2011’s “X-Men: First Class”, a prequel which eschewed being a cheap cash-in and carried itself along with a highly energetic tone, prestige acting, and a genuine sense of wonder at these awesome mutants with their powers.

What a shame, then, that X-Men Days of Future Past foregoes all that in favour of being, well, frankly dull. Don’t get me wrong, the components are there, but the film seems too unsure of itself, and never strikes any note of consistency. Characters are bought back, just to be recognised, and then dropped again. The film blinkers its vision with too much plot, too much faff and hassle, and not enough thought.

The core story is interesting enough, and takes its inspirations from a comic of the same name written in the 1980’s, which I have read and enjoyed. In the present day, mutants and their sympathisers are outlawed and guarded by giant machines called “sentinels”, which were designed in 1973 by an anti-mutant engineer called Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage). Except in 1973, Bolivar Trask was assassinated by shape-shifting mutant Rogue (Jennifer Laurence), which only exacerbated the anti-mutant situation and brought about the dystopia in the present day. Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Erik Lehnsherr (Ian McKellen), better known as Professor X and Magneto, enlist the invincible mutant Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), who I’m sure you’re familiar with by now, to go back in time to 1973 and stop Trask being assassinated, thus averting the anti-mutant movement and preventing society from falling to ruins. You still with me? In all fairness, the film does take its time over setting up the plot, and the film is never as confusing as it could have been, given it’s a time travel movie. So the film does have that.

You may have spotted certain parallels with discrimination and prejudice, and it is worth saying that the films have never been coy about their themes, which is something I’ve always admired about the franchise. The mutants have always been a metaphor for the oppressed, in particular gay teenagers (the mutantism always has a tendency to manifest itself along with the first feelings of sexuality). The first film was about an anti-mutant senator, the second film was about a general who experimented on Wolverine, and the third one was about a “cure” for mutantism. This one, though, doesn’t really go to many places with its subtext, despite it being placed at the forefront. There’s also some misguided symbolism; note the heap of bodies at the beginning of the film, which is designed to recall the Holocaust. Magneto was even a young Jewish boy in the time of the war. The mutants of the future have an “M” carved into their face, a shocking image, and there are some gruesome pictures of mutant experiments, but these points never align themselves into something overarching, or bigger. It just bumbles along, making plot points.

The acting, too, is hampered by the film itself. The film combines Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Michael Fassbender (in my eyes, one of the very best actors currently working), Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Laurence, Halle Berry, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, Ellen Page and Omar Sy. That is a talented roster, and the film does not use them. Ian McKellen, for example, maybe gets about five lines. Michael Fassbender is wasted and limited to a special effect, and any attempts to plumb his character are shallow and vague. Hugh Jackman, who has been the subject of two separate films, is given some wonky lines and the occasional inspiring monologue. And so on, and so on. There’s always the risk with ensemble casts that you end up drowning the audience with too many characters; that’s what happens here. The films have always tended to pride themselves on a family unit and relationships that are resolutely not Mannichean, that could feasibly exist in the real world. Yet this film is all surface, no depth.

This leads me on to my biggest issue with the film; it’s simultaneously a baggy film which could have been a bit longer, and I hopefully envisage a director’s cut out there in which all of these aspects are given their dues. In an age where most films are half an hour too long, it seems odd that I can view this film sitting comfortably as a TV miniseries, or a three hour epic. It feels too compressed.

Finally, it also doesn’t distinguish itself visually. One sequence, which had the power to awe, sees Magneto lifting an entire baseball stadium into the air and carrying it across Washington, and it simply comes across as flat and dull. The film has a pervasive grey look about it which disappoints. It’s fresh from the school of clean and polished Hollywood cinematography, and it looks like everything else that’s been released in the last ten years. We are truly living in the time of Nolan now, and this film proves that.

It reeks of disappointment and unfulfilled promises. A tighter focus, perhaps, or a longer running time, may have saved this film, but as it is it seems stuck in limbo, unsure, timid, dull. The fact that one of the highlights of the film is borrowed from the 2006 animated kid’s comedy “Over The Hedge” says an awful lot.