The Hobbit (once upon a very long time…)

“Will you follow me, one last time?”

With my daughter, we completed our Xmas Tolkien cycle by going together to see The battle of the five armies. As several have noted before me, the best thing I can say about this Hobbit series is that it is now… over! Just like the previous two instalments, watching Peter Jackson’s grand finale was mostly enjoyable, but mainly for the same reasons one enjoys visiting a venerable great-aunt once a year around Christmas, namely for bringing back memories of good times and shared laughs. Indeed, Jackson managed to link both sagas through his central character of Gandalf who, while overly fond of raised eyebrows and mischievous eyes, is certainly the most compelling character all over.  While the plot stretched too thinly to keep me enthralled, as I could not remember why the orcs and goblins were converging to Erebor at the same time as the elves and dwarves and men of Dale (unless it was to justify the future name of the battle?!), I soon got battle-weary of the repeated clashes between the various armies which sounded like straight copies from on-line war games and even more of the half-dozen duels, while the rescue of Gandalf from Dol Gurdur is unbearably clumsy, with an apocryphal appearance of the Nazguls. As too often in the story, the giant eagles were so instrumental to victory that one could only wonder why they had not been around from the start.

The comical parts are much sparser here than in the previous movies: hardly any screen time for Radagast’s rabbits, thank Sauron!, or for the jovial Dain with his great Scottish brogue and his war[t]hog opening, or yet for Thranduil’s moose to show its major advantage in battle, a few steps before being shot down, or for the war mountain goats who appeared then vanished at the moment of direst need, or for Bard to find a pre-historical skateboard. I also noted that the [dumb] orgs managed to invent a precursor of Chappe’s telegraph that alas could only transmit one symbol [since it was always taking the same shape!], that Legolas recreated the Matrix by walking on a disintegrating bridge, and that Thorin turned on gravity for a few crucial seconds in a movie where most characters seem to have no issue with falling, jumping or fighting without the slightest consideration for mechanics, with a strong tendency for characters to head-butt into walls…

“What this adaptation of “The Hobbit” can’t avoid by its final instalment is its predictability and hollow foundations.” NYT, Dec. 16, 2014

Other features I did not enjoy much: Thorin sulked way too long, Alferid outlasted its stay on screen by about 144 minutes, only to vanish unexpectedly, Bilbo seemed lost at the margins most of the movie, while the love story between Kili and Tauriel was really one addition too many to Tolkien’s book. The search for variety in the steeds of the various armies made me almost wish for more races on the battle-field as we could then have seen fighters on giant moles or on battle-hens… And everyone could have done without the “Dune moment”, with giant earth-worms breaking tunnels only to return to oblivion. Anyway, we have now been “There and Back Again” and can now settle in our own hobbit-hole to re-read the books and enjoy a certain nostalgia about the days where we could imagine on our own how Bilbo, Gandalf or Thorin would look like, while humming “Song of the Misty Mountains”…