'The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies'

Finally, The End Of The End Of the Beginning

The second run through Middle Earth with The Hobbit movies has been harder to take with the waiting between pictures, than the first time through with Lord of the Rings. The waiting got progressively worse even though these films were brought out on schedule. 'Desolation of Smaug' finished on such a cliff-hanger, waiting for the final instalment has been teeth grinding. Added to the fact that the rather slim book got stretched out to three movies in order to contextualise the entire Lord of the Rings cycle of movies, the added plots and sub-plots made the second film all but incomprehensible its own.

Well, this was the movie to end it all and complete the cycle across 6movies. It has been nearly a decade and a half since the original Lord of the Rings movie came out, and maybe we are all exhausted by all this wondrous Tolkien imagery and pageant and battle. Peter Jackson has said he does not have any rights to the other Tolkien material, so for him, this is the end of the line with Middle Earth. Those who wish for him to continue and pick stories out of the Silmarillion know not what they ask.

Uh, no spoiler alerts for a book this old being turned into a movie.

What's Good About It

It's pretty decisive. No loose ends. Everybody gets their hacks in and some go out in a blaze of glory. It's much better than how Star Wars 'Attack of the Clones' and 'Revenge of the Sith' close out the prequel. Maybe Jackson simply is a better director than Lucas. When all is said and done with this film, you don't feel like the whole thing was a missed opportunity, but that it leads in quite well to the earlier cycle.

What's Bad About It

The locale of the battle and its many faces gets really confusing, and some parts of the battle are simply left for dead so we ca concentrate on a bunch of action around the main characters - who miraculously have no trouble going from one part of the battle to another.

Some times they're just too crazy, and you're left thinking "If they can do that, why don't they just..."
It strains incredulity even though it is fantasy. Well, you know, there's fantasy and there's fantasy...

Also, I refuse to accept that Orcs bred for war are so easily dispatched.

What's Interesting About It

It would make no sense if you don't watch at least 'Desolation of Smaug' before walking in. You can't just watch this film and have it make its own sense. It's not a bad thing if you accept that it's a piece in a series films but it was like 5hours of viewing just to get through the no.2 and no.3 films in the story line. One sort of wonders if that is the kind of film making one just has to accept that it makes no sense its own.

I guess it's not a bad thing but they should at least tell you that you'd better brush up on your Hobbit-lore before walking in. The film kicks off with Smaug hitting Laketown turning it into a sea of fire. It's spectacular but would make no sense what is at stake if you can't remember who all these people are. It's a weird film that way. It's amazing that cinema has come to accept that you can make a 2hour movie that makes no sense internally as a stand alone, and still have it as a big hit.

Smaug Buys It

It's in the book, and yes it is the way it goes but Smaug for all his CGI magnificence buys a farm rather easily. Bard's shot with the Black Arrow is quite trilling, but you get the feeling that it's a bit of a letdown. The second film might have been better if they played it through to where Bard slays Smaug, and kicked off the third film from the dissension that takes place once the treasure is secured. As it is, they spend the better part of two movies building it up and then - bang, "lucky shot sir!" - and the villain presiding over the preceding 5hours of screen time is dead.

Smaug's problem is that he doesn't hold out until the Orcs and the Goblin mercenaries and the other things with wings arrive. He ventures out on his own and gets shot down on his own before the main event. Had he waited for the Orcs and the Goblins, concentrated his fire breath weapon on the ground troops, the bad guys would have had their day. He really is a rather stupid dragon.

It did remind me of Count Dooku. Count Dooku of course puts up a great fight at the end of 'Attack of the Clones' and you're led to believe he's a mighty Sith, and then somewhere in Act I of 'Revenge of the Sith', he gets cut down rather easily by Anakin Skywalker. It leaves a similar kind of "what-the-hell-was-all-that-fuss-about?" feeling. Of course, you can blame Jackson for lumping Smaug's demise into Act I of the third film instead of Act III of the second film. You can also blame Tolkien for being a bad dramaturg. But what Tokien really wanted to write about was 'the Treasure of the Sierra Madre' where Thorin goes all Humphrey Bogart, so maybe Smaug was the big MacGuffin.

Race Politics And Tolkien Part 6

I really like this film and the other films in this cycle but here's the thing... They're really racist and racialist.

I know the book is written that way by a guy who grew up in South Arica, in a time when it was okay to think like this, but the essentialism of the description of the character makes it really hard to discuss Tolkien without going into race discourse. The strangest takeaway this time is possibly how white-European Middle Earth is, combined across 6 films. It's not Vikings where you expect everybody to be white European by dint of time and place. This is a fantasy setting.

I feel like an idiot complaining about it, but Orcs are played by Marois - essentially assigned as the other. Even then you can't tell they're Maoris with all the CGI and special effects makeup. So all the humans are white except for a token asian woman extra in there (and we won't ask how she got there in the story, it's not important!), The Dwarves who are Demi-Human, are all white; The Elves are Hyper-White, Nazi-Delight; and the Orcs' skin tone is ... ghostly pale white.

It's a film where it's somebody's fantasy that there are only white people and white people concerns front and centre. And the excuse will be, "but it's loosely based on medieval Europe, of course it's only got white people." Well what's in the East of Middle Earth? Nothing good, and then the map peters out.

Maybe back in 2001when the first LOTR film came out, this kind of conception was okay. But in 2015, it sticks out like a sore thumb that Middle Earth is white as the driven snow. Tolkien and Jackson combined, offer no positive roles for blacks, hispanics, asians, south asians, indigenous peoples and Pacific Islanders or anybody else not white. In an era when Sylvester Stallone works really hard to include Jet Li and Terry Crews into his bunch of action has-beens, is this whiteness-galore all that great?

Yet, that's what sticks out. It's a bunch of films that puts on screen just how institutional racism and exclusion works.
I'm sorry I even have to write that, but it's painfully true of the whole genre spawned by Tolkien.

Tauriel's Love For Kili

A number of people objected when I characterised the love interest between Tauriel and Kili as interspecies sex. Let me just recap something here: Tauriel isn't any white beautiful woman, she's an elf.  Kill isn't some ruggedly handsome dude that's short, he's a Dwarf. Elves and Dwarves are not the same stock of anything. It's more like if Evangeline Lilly fell in love, not with a  ruggedly handsome short dude but an Orangutan. Maybe when Tauriel sheds tears for Kili's death at the end, it is more the tears of a pet owner shedding tears for a dead pet. That hurts, that's love too. But for it to be the kind of standard heterosexual movie love interest, we're really talking Pony the Orangutan and inter-species sex.

The only reason people don't see it immediately is because two white actors are playing the role. I'd be more impressed if they made this love interest stick with a Dwarf and an Orc and an Orc played by a white woman and a dwarf played by a black man. Then watch the furore.