Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Ian McKellan, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Luke Evans
Have I Seen it Before: No. This one Lora and I are sure of. After shrugging our way through The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), there may have been some desire to catch the final Middle-Earth feature film (especially from Lora, the actual Tolkien fan in the house), but somehow not a lot of followthrough.
Did I Like It: Almost. The run-time is the shortest of any movie Jackson has done since The Frighteners (1996)*. That helps a lot.
However.
Smaug is dispatched in the first reel of this movie. Doesn’t that mean that the story of The Hobbit is done. Sure, Jackson could fill the return to the Shire and the consternation over the fate of the gold under the mountain for forty-five minutes, but shouldn’t we be heading out of the theater before sundown at this point?
I truly have underestimated the man’s ability—nay, pathological need—to pad things out.
And by the end, things are dispatched with such ruthless speed, I can’t help but wonder if the slightly diminishing returns mandated some changes in the Jackson working style. Evangeline Lilly (little known fact: not played by Liv Tyler) and her love affair with a dwarf is ended with none of the pathos from the LOTR trilogy it was so thoroughly trying to ape.
It’s difficult for me to forgive a fueling sense of nostalgia for a film series I didn’t love to begins with.
Also, which five armies are we talking about here. One, dwarves. Two, men. Three, orcs. Four, elves.
Five… Five? Anyone? Gandalf (McKellan) and a handful of other LOTR characters, who spend the majority of the movie inevitably failing in their goals to forestall something we already know will happen? Bilbo alone (Freeman)? Legolas (Orlando Bloom), who still somehow appears in the film? Are we the viewers—and perhaps, more appropriately, the fans—the fifth army? I can’t readily come up with a more befuddling title for a film, mainly because I’m distracting myself with still shaking my head over this one.
*I’ve now gone two-for-three on referring to The Frighteners in my review of Hobbit films. Maybe it’s time to re-watch The Frighteners…