Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) hides the Arkenstone from Thorin in the last installment of THE HOBBIT
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES (Peter Jackson, 2014)
Opens Wednesday, December 17
www.thehobbit.com
Peter Jackson’s sixteen-year adventure through J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth comes to its inevitable conclusion with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third film in the prequel trilogy that began with An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug. The story picks up as the enormous fire-breathing flying dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) is laying waste to the island of Lake-town as the thirteen Dwarves of Erebor watch from the Lonely Mountain. But soon after the brave Bard (Luke Evans) dispatches the evil beast in spectacular fashion, the Men of the Lake, the Orcs, the Elves, and the Goblins all descend on Erebor seeking either refuge, revenge, or the massive amount of gold that fills the abandoned castle. However, Dwarves king Thorin Oakenshield II (Richard Armitage) has been overcome with dragon-sickness, an unbounded greed that has him protecting every single piece of the vast treasure, refusing to share it with anyone but his thirteen cohorts as he searches for the powerful Arkenstone that Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is hiding. Meanwhile, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Elrond (Hugo Weaving), and Saruman (Christopher Lee) take on Sauron the Necromancer (voiced by Cumberbatch); the Elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the Dwarf Kíli (Aidan Turner) explore their forbidden love; and a stream of frightening creatures join the fray. Also along for this final ride is Legolas (Orlando Bloom), his father, Thranduil (Lee Pace), Thorin’s cousin Dáin (Billy Connolly), the brutal, scimitar-armed Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett) and his brutal son, Bolg (John Tui), and the pompous, greedy Master of Lake-town (Stephen Fry).
All-out war is at the center of THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES
“This was the last move in a master plan, a plan long in the making,” Gandalf says at one point, and he could be referring to Jackson’s two trilogies, which began with the three Lord of the Rings films in 2001, 2002, and 2003 and has at last come to an end now. But while The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King brought audiences into a magical, dazzling world with well-developed characters and intense tales, The Hobbit winds down with a surprisingly lifeless narrative built around battle scenes that grow tiresome quickly. It is as if Jackson decided that after all the other movies, everyone knows all the characters and their motives, but one of the many things that made the first trilogy so successful was that each of the films worked on their own; The Battle of the Five Armies was made by a huge Tolkien fan who might have forgotten that most people are not as familiar with the details of Middle-earth as he is. Even in Imax 3-D and clocking in at a mere 144 minutes, 17 minutes shorter than any of the other five films, this last entry drags on, making one long for it to end. In many ways it’s reminiscent of the Star Wars franchise, where the first three films worked so well but the three prequels were disappointing. But while there might be more Star Wars films coming, this is it for the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, which is not necessarily a bad thing, so we can all go back to the first trilogy, among the best fantasy-adventure stories ever told — and, of course, the books themselves.