The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (dir. Peter Jackson 2014)

My review of this last Hobbit movie is up on Strange Horizons now. Long review short: it's The Hobbit: The Bad Tale of the Five Armies.

So: none of the character motivations make any sense, with the possible exception of Bilbo—and he gets much too little screen time in this, especially considering that the movie's main title refers to him alone. Not that the film's subtitle accurately reflects the movie either. I don't just mean the numeration; I mean the "battle" part. Some long shots of CGI hordes flowing over CGI landscapes aside, this movie has no interest in "battles" as such. It is interested in single combats, for which war, howsoever meager the causus belli, provides the opportunity. This individuation of war is part and parcel of the "defining" nature of these films taken together. They cannot, it turns out, think the collective at all; they can only think the individual—the fan favorite, the key prop, the singular. That's a pity.

It's a pity for the logic of a film called "The Battle of the Five Armies," but it's a bigger pity in terms of the adaptation from Tolkien. Indeed, I wonder if this—rather than the spurious addition of sexy elvish maidens, giant rock chewing worms, and Super Mario-ish combat sequences—is the main mismatch between Tolkien's source text and Jackson's films. Jackson thinks in Romantic and post-Romantic terms, of tragic-heroic heroes and heroines; his vision is fundamentally Byronic and Gothic. Tolkien, though, is a deeply pre-Romantic writer, who thinks in terms of communities, peoples, languages and the idioms of human congregation. These are his great themes, and his evils are things (like the Ring) that cut the individual off from human community.

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[A Message From Our Sponsors]. By way of a PS. The point, in this review, about the balletic quality and function of the choreographed fighting in these movies is cribbed from Professor Robert Eaglestone, of Royal Holloway London, who first noted it (I think on Facebook) with reference to Hobbit 2. If you liked the Hobbit 3 review, you'll find more like it in this volume, for a piffling £3.42. In slightly, though not entirely, more serious mode, The Riddles of the Hobbit (Palgrave 2013) sees me pondering The Hobbit (the book) and other Tolkien-related issues at greater length.