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The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies (SPOILERS)

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Warning: spoilers present in post and welcome in comments!

I understand critical response is muted/mixed, but I found it an emotionally satisfying end to the trilogy of films in a “the films are what they are” kind of way. Dwarves are silly. Physics is entirely optional, as are military tactics. Bilbo/Thorin is not very subtextual.

SADNESS: NO GOLLUM, PRECIOUS.

Wondered about/worried at!

  • The Battle of Five Armies is a skirmish of five armies. There’s no encampments, no supply lines, no reinforcements, no expectation that the battle might last more than an hour or two. Dain marched his people from the Iron Hills for this? (My fellow movie viewers noted to me that Thranduil is expecting to win bloodlessly by overwhelming display of force, but, confidential to Thranduil, you’re laying a siege. Bring some food and tents and maybe siege engines.) The Paintball of Five Armies.
  • Only the Orcs get some credit for tactics/preparedness. They have a command centre with good lines of sight, agreed signalling, and a general who doesn’t lead from the front. (Heroic to lead from the front, yes, sensible, no.)
  • Everyone else in is the tactics doghouse. I’m giving the Men of Laketown a pass: they lack tactics and preparedness because they are a desperate, starving, group of refugees. OK. The Wood Elves, on the other hand, have no such excuse.
  • How are there so many Wood Elves, anyway? Is this not the dawn of the Age of Men? I realise they’re mostly Silvan elves, but still, there are thousands and thousands of them and they’re highly disciplined warriors. Why are they not taking over the world? The Age of Elves, we could make this happen.
  • The Orc-ish forces are hugely overpowered compared to The Lord of the Rings movies: the earth-eating worms and the monsters that can head-butt their way into fortresses really seem like they should have been useful at Helm’s Deep (in The Two Towers). Saruman seems like the type who would have used them too. (And why did he bother breeding a more battle-hardy breed of Orc anyway? The Angmar version seem pretty decent.)
  • The Orcs start to lose some credit with the Thorin-Fili-Kili death sequence though. Why were the Orcs trying to trap Thorin (or, I guess, Dain, who seems as Gandalf says, more hot-headed) into single combat with their general, exactly? Of what possible tactical use could it be? Surely such a well-organised outfit has good enough intelligence to know that Thorin is on decidedly shaky ground as the King Under the Mountain (remember how he was under siege by another army?) and morale may not suffer as expected when you kill him?
  • In book canon, I believe the attack on Dol Guldur has Sauron merely pretend to fall before the White Council, as he is in fact ready to re-occupy Mordor but doesn’t want it to immediately be attacked. That would make more sense here too, but if so, we don’t see it. And Galadriel is evidently grievously wounded, but… this has no implications for anything in the future whatsoever?

One thing did sting my heart a bit: Bilbo seems to be setting off either before Thorin’s funeral, or just after it and before his wake. This seems to be a reversion to his self at the beginning of the trilogy. By this stage, it would be nice if Bilbo knew how to party or was willing to try. At least at highly personally and culturally significant moments like that one. (If nothing else, The Lord of the Rings kicks off with Bilbo throwing the party to end all parties, he has to have acquired the taste for it somewhere.)

There’s also a lot of loose-ish threads. Movie!Legolas is, it seems, off to play the role of Elrond’s sons Elladan and Elrohir (who do actually also exist in the movie canon, but not to any great effect): essentially Elvish Dunedain, and likewise motivated by an Orc-ish injury to their mother. Movie!Legolas, it seems, doesn’t even have a resolution to his mother’s story. All the more reason to go Orc-hunting! But how is that going to work out for him? If I recall the Council of Elrond in the movies right, Legolas and Aragorn don’t behave like comrades-in-arms who have seen each other recently.

Meanwhile, Tauriel is last seen grieving Kili with her status as an exile unresolved, likewise Legolas’s unreturned feelings for her.

Am I right in thinking that in this cut, the Arkenstone vanished into Bard’s coat never to be seen again? If there’s one thing that stands out to me from the book, it’s Thorin’s burial with it on his chest.

And above it all, movie!Angmar is by no means defeated. Is Jackson setting up a third trilogy without a book source (other than the Appendices) to cover the time between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings? Or is that all video game canon?

I feel like the extended edition is going to be called on to do a lot of world-building work here that the cinematic edition sacrificed for pacing. Honestly, I think a lot of this will still be loose: there just won’t be screen time in that cut either, assuming that even the original scripts answered my questions.

Ahem. So… what did you think?

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Movie Thread — The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (SPOILERS)

This article originally appeared on Hoyden About Town.

Beware, the unspoiled: both the post and the comments can be assumed to contain copious spoilers.

Because it appears to have been days since our last media thread, here’s one for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which opened today in Australia.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

I am pleased that the pretty legitimate grievances that pretty much everyone between the Blue Mountains and Erebor has against the King Under the Mountain (and Thorin as his heir) is being treated seriously from the narrative point of view. As well they should be. Thrór and others have a lot of blood on their hands.

There seemed to be… less impossible physics in this one. Don’t get me wrong, still impossible, but there wasn’t someone surviving a two hundred metre fall every third minute.

This is far more One Ring-centric than the book is (and I believe later editions of The Hobbit are actually already edited to make the One a little more prominent), which makes me wonder if Thrain being the last holder of one of the Seven Rings is going to arise at all.

Essentially every time Balin appears on screen, I can’t help but be all “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT RETAKING MORIA. NO. NOOOOOO.” I don’t think I’m getting through.

Still annoyed that dwarves are more dimorphic on gender lines in Jackson’s films than they are in Tolkien’s books (the Appendices to LoTR clearly state that non-dwarves cannot easily distinguish any of their men and women). And Legolas’s joke about it is then yucky.

For that matter, I can’t figure out how it possibly makes sense for Legolas and Tauriel to want or promise their captive orc that his life will be spared. Warfare in this universe is take-no-prisoners on both sides, justified on the elvish side by the universal corruption and evil of the orcs. Which is immensely problematised by critics for good reasons, but I don’t think the answer on Jackson’s side is inserting one inexplicable act example of different and not thought-through ethics. Surely Legolas knew that the prisoner has seen the centre of Thranduil’s abode he was a dead orc walking. Where were they going to free him? What was he going to do then? How were they planning to prevent him returning to his fellows to recount everything he saw of Thranduil’s security arrangements? (Of which, I have to say, they seem to already know a worrying amount.) You have to think about these things a little bit, elves.

I am not clear at all on what Sauron wants with Gandalf as a captive either. It’s not their first encounter, Sauron likely knows that he’s incorruptible and that the extent of his powers is sizable and likely not fully revealed, so it’s not about enslaving him or using him as a weapon. While he’s alive, he’s a danger in some form. Sauron is not winning the Cleverer Than a Balrog award this year.

Very obvious cameo, Peter Jackson! Was yours the very first reasonably close shot of a person in the entire movie? I think it might have been!

Very subtle cameos, Stephen Colbert and family! It seems to be pretty well known by now that Colbert played one of the Laketown spies who are watching Bard, and that his family also feature in Laketown scenes, but absolutely no news source I can find has even managed to source stills showing Colbert himself, let alone his family. I certainly didn’t notice him, and we were watching for him (although not knowing to look in Laketown, specifically)!

No Gollum!! Woe.