The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, MGM, WingNut Films, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago at 9 p.m. Charles and I ran the last movie in the three-film trilogy based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1937 young-adult novel The Hobbit, first episode in the Lord of the Rings cycle and the introduction to Middle-Earth and its populations of hobbits, dwarves, elves, orcs, dragons and whatnot. There’s considerable debate among Tolkienites over what place The Hobbit has in the cycle and whether it’s integral or simply a precursor, and as Charles once explained to me part of the confusion is because Tolkien asked his publishers for permission to revise The Hobbit after he completed the three big books that make up The Lord of the Rings and bring it more in line with the rest of the cycle, but the publisher said that The Hobbit was already considered a classic of British children’s literature and so Tolkien was allowed to make only minor changes.

In the early 2000’s writer-director Peter Jackson shot films of the three main Lord of the Rings books back-to-back (after earlier attempts to film the cycle either hadn’t come off at all or had got stuck after book one), and the films were such a fantastic commercial success he got the green light in the early 2010’s to spin three movies out of The Hobbit – which resulted in three ponderous, overloaded dramas that at least for me, a decided non-Tolkien fan (though I think he was being a little unfair, my sympathies are with the BBC Music Magazine critic who said he “wondered, how in a world where Wagner’s Ring exists, anyone can take Tolkien’s seriously”), were more of an endurance test than an entertainment. The three-film cycle began with An Unexpected Journey, continued through The Desolation of Smaug (Smaug – pronounced “Smowg,” by the way – is a dragon that took over the dwarf kingdom inside the Lonely Mountain of Erebor and seized the gold hoard the dwarf-king had forced his subjects to accumulate, killing most of the dwarves and driving the rest into exile) and ended with the movie we just watched, The Battle of the Five Armies. Actually there’d been a passing line in The Desolation of Smaug that there would be seven armies in the final action scene, and I found myself wondering where the other two armies had gone – though in Battle I quickly found myself losing track of just how many armies there were. When we watched videos of Wagner’s Ring together Charles made fun of them for being so thinly populated – “in the first three episodes there seem to be only 12 people in the whole universe,” he joked – but for me Tolkien erred in the other direction, creating so many different races and communities it’s hard for me to keep track of who is who and what side they’re on. It doesn’t help that though one of his species is called “dwarves” they’re not especially small – indeed, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), is not only not a little person, he’s the sexiest guy in the film and the closest it has to a romantic leading man.

The basic plot of The Hobbit is that Thorin has assembled a guerrilla force of 13 people to help mobilize the dwarves, kill Smaug and reconquer the Lonely Mountain – only the mountain can only be entered through a gate that can only be seen by moonlight when the moon is at a particular phase, and they recruit hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) because they think he’s a particularly skilled burglar who can figure out a way to open the gate so they can go in the Lonely Mountain and confront Smaug. Bilbo gets into the mountain to steal the magic jewel that is the talisman of power for the dwarf kings, and he and Smaug have a long, drawn-out confrontation scene in which the dragon has way too much dialogue for the dragon – I missed the relative taciturnicity of Wagner’s dragon Fafner, who said little more to Siegfried than, “I have and I hold – let me sleep!” I had also expected Smaug to be dispatched at the end of episode two but instead Jackson and his writers (including Guillermo del Toro – and I suspect I would have liked these movies better if he had directed them, if only because he wouldn’t have made them so goddamned long!) decided to keep Smaug alive and have him burn out a city of humans at the foot of the Lonely Mountain before he’s finally killed by a magic arrow that has to be fired on one particular part of his body because that’s his Achilles’ heel or the part of Siegfried’s back where the linden leaf landed (you remember).

There are some genuinely emotional scenes depicting the impossible love affair between dwarf prince Thorin and elf princess Galadriel (Cate Blanchett – and it’s an indication of how much appeal The Lord of the Rings has that they were able to get a star of her stature for a pretty small role), and there’s a conflict between the elf prince Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and his rival over whether the elves should get involved in this conflict at all. At least The Battle of the Five Armies has less of the interminable exposition that weighed down the first two Hobbit movies – Jackson and his co-writers have finally made clear (as much as it’s ever clear in Tolkien!) who is who and what they’re fighting about, and so he can concentrate on the spectacular action scenes that are the main reason anyone goes to a film like this. I also missed Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, who was central to the first film but was pretty much kept to one side in the next two; though some excellent actors appeared in these movies, McKellen was by far the best cast member in terms of projecting power and authority. And if he looks a decade older here than he did in the Lord of the Rings films … well, he’s a wizard, and he could easily have taken a few years off between the cycles with his magic powers. I can see why there are so many people who have cherished Tolkien’s cycle and taken it to their hearts (including Stephen Colbert, who mentioned it on last Tuesday night’s show and who made a cameo appearance in The Desolation of Smaug), but I found myself unable to make it through The Fellowship of the Ring when I tried to read it in the 1960’s (during the books’ first flush of popularity) and the movies have been something of a trial for me as well.