The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the third installment of the multibillion trilogy based on The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again written by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is also the sixth movie based on Tolkien’s works and directed by Peter Jackson. The screenplay was written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro.
The Battle of The Five Armies (originally titled There and Back Again) is the Hobbit trilogy’s third movie, based on The Hobbit as well as short sections of other pieces of Tolkien’s works. In a nutshell, the movie follows the journey of Bilbo Baggins, who faces the harsh reality of war after following the thirteen dwarves to the Lonely Mountain, also known as Erebor. Needless to say, the mountain is more or less full of gold, and is therefore not only of interest to the dwarves but to the elves and the people of Lake Town as well as an army of orcs. The movie also brings to screen the struggles of Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans), a man facing the aftermath of the utter obliteration of his hometown and the upcoming threat of war.
Martin Freeman gives an excellent performance as the movie’s title character Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit. I found myself following Bilbo’s struggles even more intently than in the two previous movies, which only shows Freeman’s impressive acting abilities. Other talented actors in the movie include Richard Armitage who does a wonderful job in bringing to life the madness that takes over the king of Erebor, Thorin Oakenshield. Indeed the movie includes almost award-worthy performances by many known actors for example Benedict Cumberbatch as both the dragon Smaug and the evil Lord Sauron and Lee Pace as the ’Elvenking’ Thranduil. But what blew my mind away was (once again) the performance of the 75-year-old Sir Ian McKellen. His performance as Gandalf is extraordinary, especially when one takes in to consideration his age and the amount of action scenes that Gandalf has. And of course I should also mention Sir Christopher Lee (Saruman the White) who gets his fair share of action despite his considerable age of 92.
The Hobbit trilogy was the first to introduce the so called HFR to the wide public. HFR (which stands for ’high frame rate’) basically means that instead of showing 24 frames per second, a higher number – 48 in the Hobbit – is shown. The HFR combined with the 3D features and the movie’s enormous budget guarantee that there is never a shortage of things to marvel at. Despite the movie’s scenery (such as the halls and front of the mountain Erebor, Lake Town and later the city of Dale) being mostly made with computers the attention to detail is incredible. It’s almost too real. From time to time the 3D and the incredibly sharp picture were a little too much. Somehow I found it hard to look at certain things because my eyes were distracted by too many aspects. This happened whenever the Arkenstone, the legendary jewel the dwarves and their king Thorin in particular coveted, was shown. It was like an explosion of tiny particles which made it a little annoying to look at. But with Peter Jackson as the director you can’t really be sure if that was done on purpose.
The movie’s soundtrack was composed by Howard Shore who had previously worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy with Peter Jackson. His music brings a feeling on continuity to the screen as film after film, one’s able to recognize the familiar tunes. Considering how Howard Shore won not only one but three Oscars for his music in the Lord of the Rings, I’m very surprised his works in The Hobbit have not won him any awards. Shore’s music in The Battle of the Five Armies was amazing and I especially enjoyed how every theme had it’s own music. The dwarves had their own tunes and the elves their own and when both were shown on screen the audience heard a genius mixture of the two.
All in all I enjoyed the film very much. Whether that was because I had read the book or because I’m somewhat unable to ever find flaws in works based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings, I do not know. I found the film’s title The Battle of The Five Armies very suiting as it did have very, very big battles. In fact the only small flaw in the movie was the fact that almost two hours of its 2h22min running time was fighting. But when you stretch one book of around 300 pages in to three movies you can’t expect them all to have two hours worth of incredibly well-designed emotional scenes. I am, however, a little sad. The ending of The Battle of the Five Armies marked, at least for me, an end to Tolkien on screen. Years ago, only the rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were sold. That means that Tolkien’s other, brilliant works might never see the inside of a movie theatre. As the rights to Silmarillion were never sold – and it seems that Tolkien’s estate isn’t going to sell them any time soon – it might well be that this was the kiss goodbye (or perhaps more suitably The Last Goodbye as sung by Billy Boyd during the credits) to Middle Earth. But then again, isn’t that what they said when the closing credits of the Lord of the Rings ended?