There And Back Again

Year: 2014

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage

Run Time: 2 hours 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I wish I could say this was the end of the Middle Earth franchise. It seems like it is. But nobody could have predicted that after the conclusion of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, New Line Cinema could have ever become sufficiently desperate to drag a reluctant Peter Jackson into helming a trio of mirthless prequels based on the 300-page book The Hobbit. This is Hollywood, baby. Anything can happen. So take this with a grain of salt (or a handful of grains of salt around the rim of a margarita glass - I don't blame you if you feel the need to drown your sorrows), but we're finally, finally finished.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies cost more money than you or I will ever make in our lifetimes. Combined. Armed with that budget, it guarantees that the film isn't, like, bad bad. The costumes are neat. And the sets are impressive. But if I've ever seen a film so extravagantly, effortfully pointless as this, I must have blocked it out of my memory long ago.

Oh dear, it's all rushing back to me.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies opens its overlong run time (though it's mercifully shorter than the previous two entries) by leaping straight into where the last film left off. The dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) is attacking Lake Town while the elf warrior Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), the Master of Lake Town (Stephen Fry), like 517 dwarves, and the city's populace attempt to make an escape through the besieged canals.

If you are like me, you prepared for this film by neither re-watching The Desolation of Smaug nor poring over The Silmarillion quite as studiously as you might have, and thus are completely in the dark as to what exactly is happening, to whom, and why (for god's sake, why?). Who are these dozens of characters we're meant to keep track of? What does this dragon have against the seemingly peaceful, if a bit unhygienic denizens of Lake Town? Why, in a world where places are named things like Rivendell or Mordor, did anybody think "Lake Town" was a keen way to go? And - most importantly - Why are we supposed to take this dragon attack seriously when it looks like a slightly updated remaster of Castlevania? 

To be fair, the CGI here is nowhere as egregious as in previous entries, but it opens on what is by far its worst bit, compounded with the fact that we have no time to take a breath and adjust to the narrative universe before all hell breaks loose. The scene with Smaug has no bearing on the plot of the film at large and would be much better placed at the end of the second entry, though I'm glad Benedict Cumberbatch will be receiving a third paycheck. Atta boy, Cumbie. ...Bendy? We'll come up with a nickname later.

We don't have time to worry about nicknames. We've got a dozen dwarves to pretend we care about.

The rest of the film centers around various troops mobilizing to stake their claim over the now vacant Lonely Mountain. If you guessed that there were five of said armies, you're quite clever. Far too clever for the film, which (depending on who's counting) displays somewhere between 4 and 7 armies, only three of which are etched out in any real way. These three are the dwarves from the first two films, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), who just want their home back, though Thorin begins to succumb to his miserly treasure-hoarding instinct; the elves, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace), who crave the return of some super cool fantasy gems that are rightfully theirs; and the humans of Lake Town, led by Bard (Luke Evans), who just want a place to stay and maybe a bit of reward money for helping the dwarves reclaim their kingdom and all. These armies face off against each other and a herd of orcs led by franchise villain the Pale Orc, and their battle for the kingdom lasts for pretty much the entirety of the film.

The Battle of the Five Armies gives up completely on developing character, especially for the dwarves in Thorin's crew, assuming (wrongly) that their work was completed for them in the first two thirds of the trilogy. Instead we get almost a solid hour and a half of action/war movie tropes so hoary and ancient that J. R. R. Tolkien himself would have thought they were cheesy. The day he was born. There's enough of them to make up the fifth titular army, including "we strike at dawn" (why wait?), name characters getting choked by villains instead of stabbed so somebody can come save them, and people switching between English and fictional languages with no rhyme or reason because nobody likes reading subtitles.

Perhaps the most indicative of these moments is one of those "lines heard earlier in the movie are repeated while a character makes a breakthrough" scenes, which lasts for about fifty minutes longer than it needs to and completely ignores the grandiosity of the film's attempted tone. It's melodramatic, operatic, and atrocious.

And these guys don't even get to kiss.

That scene is one among many that plays for sober grandeur, but ultimately winds up being supremely silly. I shan't spoil them, for this is a current film, after all. But just remember that by the time the pipe-cleaning scene rolls around, your brain will have rattled too far out of its socket to do you any good trying to make fun of it.

Even without its more idiotic moments, this heaving lump of a movie never finds its bearings, swiveling from one subplot to the next without a care in the world. Gandalf (Ian McKellen) fades into the background, only existing in the narrative as a conduit for several baffling cameos. The love triangle between Legolas (Orlando Bloom), Tauriel, and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner) gives a brief twitch before rotting away in ignominy. And the filmmakers are too focused on the machinations of war to remember that they're supposed to be wrapping up something. A trilogy, perhaps? One gets the sense that the idea of this film's finality is but a distant, foggy memory, clouded by opium and self-satisfaction.

At least the fight scenes are decent. None of them match the mayhem or kiddie fun of the barrel riding scene in the second film, but they're the kind of epic medieval battles we've come to expect from Jackson. Their large scale clanking makes for some enjoyable popcorn fun, the kind where you unfocus your eyes and just let it wash over you. Too many of the endlessly unspooling scenes repeat themselves for the film to be a terrifically exciting ride, but all in all it could be worse.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is a sprawling, miserly wreck. Between the scenes that require one to have substantial knowledge of the book and its battalion of appendices, the stunted characters, and the half-hearted computer graphics, one only gets the sense that it is a product of the most lazy, dispirited filmmaking on the market today. But Hollywood knows how to get butts in the seats and crams the movie full of shiny gewgaws, so at the very least you won't actively hate being in the theater.

TL;DR: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is a shambling wreck, but at least its world is decently crafted.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? I wouldn't, but it doesn't seem like very many of you are.

Word Count: 1291

Reviews In This Series

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Jackson, 2013)
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Jackson, 2014)

The Oregon Trail: Middle Earth Edition

Year: 2013

Director: Peter Jackson

Cast: Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage

Run Time: 2 hours 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I'm not exactly the world's biggest Lord of the Rings fan, and even the biggest LotR fan isn't the biggest Hobbit fan, so the only way I could bring myself to care about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second film in this largely unnecessary trilogy, was by seeing it in 48 frames per second.

The high frame rate that Peter Jackson has been using to justify the existence of these three movies is a largely experimental technique of filmmaking. When I reviewed the first film, I commented on how exhibiting a film at 48 frames per second (as opposed to the industry standard of 24 frames per second) throws the film into a kind of hyperreality that plays mad tricks on your eyes and makes everything seem more staged.

Now that I've been taking actual real film classes, I can explain the process in a little more detail (and how it's a terrible choice for this film). It's all about shutter speed. To display a film at 24 fps, a camera (naturally) needs to shoot at 24 fps. This shutter speed is a little slow, which means that each individual image has a little bit of motion blur on it.

We don't notice it when the video is playing because we're used to seeing a little bit of motion blur in our everyday lives. Wave your hand in front of your face and you'll see what I'm talking about. But the thing with 48 fps is that the faster shutter speed produces absolutely clear frames without a trace of that blur. So the film is reproducing reality with a clarity that our own eyes don't even see and as a result it messes the hell with your visual cortex.

It's unnatural and nobody can really function properly until they get used to it. Motion sickness, headache, you name it. It's a kind of cool novelty but it's not really worth the price you have to pay. And the hyperrealism just isn't a good fit for a fantasy designed to lose yourself in. It doesn't help that, out of all of the Jackson Middle Earth films so far, this one is the stagiest.

However, it is also the Lee Pace-iest.

Picking up where the last film left off, The Desolation of Smaug opens with Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and the host of dwarves (twelve interchangeable actors) led by their king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and guided by the great wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) about halfway to their destination, the Lonely Mountain, where the grand dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) is jealously guarding his treasure.

Thorin desperately wants to retrieve the MacGuffin Stone from the dragon's stash because it'll make him king or something? I'm sure this is explained either in the prequel or some deeply buried Tolkein footnote, but it is certainly not clear in this film.

As they continue on with their enormously bloated adventures based on a book roughly the size of Chapter One of Fellowship of the Ring, they progress through several more video game levels as they approach Smaug, the Final Boss. They explore a haunted forest, an impoverished lake town ruled over by a tyrannical despot (Stephen Fry), and the Elf Kingdom ruled by Thranduil (Lee Pace) and populated by exactly two elves: Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), a character invented solely to create a love triangle between the shoved-in Bloom and the sexiest dwarf.

Since Twilight cornered the market on vampire romance, why not give dwarves a try?

Do I even need to tell you that it's all unnecessarily drawn out and tedious? I think we should come to expect these things. The film is keen to explore the vast and limitless possibilities of Middle Earth politics and these exposition-dense scenes are infrequently interspersed with battling swarms of CGI monsters. It might as well be one big animated movie for all the care and attention that went into them. Honestly, a bunch of dudes in rubber suits would look better and probably save Peter Jackson a ton of money.

Smaug looks like someone forgot to render all of his scenes, Sauron's introduction looks like an Iron Butterfly music video, and the molten iron ore in the dwarf mines is hyperbolically humiliating. The fakiness of scenes can only be matched by their length as the film marches through disconnected setpieces with as much narrative thrust as an arthritic slug.

It's perhaps a little less "New Zealand Pony Parade" than the first Hobbit film was, but it's all kind of like watching somebody else play a video game - tedious and a little bit aggravating.

Although I would definitely play a game where Lara Croft and Smaug battle it out.

And the acting across the board is uninspired. Martin Freeman turns in a much less committed performance as Bilbo Baggins, largely because his character is given next to nothing to do, and Lee Pace was a good addition to the Middle Earth Repertory, but is underwritten in the few scenes he appears in.

Everybody falls into the mode of Fantasy Speak - vaguely British inflections that show how Epic and Important everything is but don't really require much effort to put on. It's all very demonstrative and broad, so no character really feels fleshed out as an actual being with thoughts or emotions. They are more Middle Earth tour guides than real characters.

Thorin Oakenshield? More like... Borin' Oakenshield. Burn!

Now really, it wasn't quite as terrible as all that. There's a tremendously well-choreographed river rapids fight scene that's sprightly and fun, and there's enough fantasy adventure to keep one occupied at a basic narrative level, but it's such a step down from the majesty of the original trilogy and even the adequacy of An Unexpected Journey that it's hard not to feel like it is deliberately trying to annoy you.

TL;DR: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is tedious and a subpar middle chapter to a trilogy that is already a pale shadow of the glory of Lord of the Rings.
Rating: 5/10
Should I Spend Money On This? You already know if you're going to go see this movie. But I wouldn't urge you to drop $15 on it if you were on the fence.
Word Count: 1068
Reviews In This Series
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Jackson, 2013)
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Jackson, 2014)

Archive: December 24, 2012

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Year: 2012
Director: Peter Jackson
Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage
Run Time: 2 hours, 49 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

Sorry I haven’t been posting a lot recently, I’ve been super busy with finals and extremely important Netflix commitments. Not that you can complain, this is free and I don’t owe you nothing.

(The first thing they teach you in Blogging 101 is to alienate your audience within the first paragraph. Let’s see how this goes.)

However, now that I am on winter break, the boredom of no longer living in the city has led me to spend more time on two pursuits: namely, watching movies, and using the computer. Both of which are conducive to writing blog posts.

Now it’s time to tackle what is undoubtedly the pillar movie of this holiday season, The Hobbit. And don’t question me on that. I work at a movie theater and I’ve cleaned up enough BP-level popcorn spills in Hobbit theaters to prove that beyond all reasonable doubt.

Contrary to popular belief, that’s a broom in his hand.

For those of you unversed in cinematography, it is worth pointing out that Jackson (and select theaters near you) has made the choice to film the movie at a rate of 48 frames per second. The standard in modern cinema is 24 frames per second because, quite frankly, that’s pretty much all the eye can handle. The Hobbit holds the distinction for being the first movie to ever use this new and improved frame rate. It’s all part of Jackson’s innovative filmmaking experimentation (see: gimmickry).

The effect of exposing the eye to twice as many frames at a time creates a sort of hyperreality in which characters seem to be moving on fast forward while at the same time carrying on at a normal pace. It is about as disconcerting to watch as it is to write. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to get used to, and it is to tell the truth an incredible thing to watch.

In addition, the high frame rate has the effect of making the actors and sets seem much more immediate and real, in essence converting the film to have somewhat of the feel of a stage play, with the actors right there in the room with the audience. It is an absolutely intriguing technique but it out and out has no place in The Hobbit.

The Middle-earth of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings is all about spectacle, epic wonder, and the sheer scope of the land. However, the hyperrealism of the high frame rate allows a make-up spot here, a visible contact lens there, and some thoroughly unconvincing CGI everywhere to take the audience out of the fantasy.

Look at that. Just embarrassing, isn’t it?

On to the plot, insofar as it exists.

The film follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a homebody hobbit from Bag End who is reluctantly dragged on an adventure across Middle-earth by the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) to help some dwarves reclaim their captured kingdom.

That’s it. They don’t even make it. That’s for the next movie to cover.

With so little real meat to work with, the grotesquely bloated run time seeks to compensate for lack of material with an overabundance of antagonists. Two of which, the Necromancer, and the dragon Smaug are only briefly touched upon due to their commitments to the sequels. Even with those threats to deal with, our intrepid gang still has quite a task on their hands. Among the ranks of their enemies include a Goblin King and his army, the Pale Orc and his minions, a horde of trolls, massive rock giants, and the inimitable Gollum.

With such a group to face, the plot follows a “meet-defeat-on to the next one” pattern that is more suited for a video game than an actual narrative.

So, yes, this film has its flaws. But what Jackson Lord of the Rings film doesn’t?

The Hobbit offers enough action-packed sequences and canned movie wisdom to keep the audience entertained and enough knowledge of the Middle-earth universe to appease the hardcore Tolkien fans.

It also features a cameo appearance by Lee Pace, one of my favorite people ever, as the elf king Thranduil. The sight of his unsurpassable eyebrows appeased me, as did his comically over-the-top elf wig.

Also worth mentioning is Bilbo Baggins’ encounter with Gollum, by far the most entertaining, suspenseful, and well-composed scene of the film and that which makes the entire price of the ticket worthwhile. Is it bad that I think Gollum’s adorable?

Look at those big ‘ol eyes.

Andy Serkis surpasses himself with a pitch perfect rendition of one of the most beloved scenes in the novel. The man can do no wrong. Please, even if you are asleep until his scene and leave right after, at least come see the film for him.

TL;DR  The Hobbit is overlong, bloated, and features some unbelievably tacky CGI effects, but is redeemed by some strong actiony moments and Andy Serkis’s superb reprisal of the role of Gollum.

Rating: 6/10

Should I spend money on this? Yes, if only for the novel experience of the 48 fps and having Gollum blow you away. Did I mention Gollum?

Word Count: 896

Reviews In This Series

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Jackson, 2012)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Jackson, 2013)
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (Jackson, 2014)