The Lord Of The Rings And The Hobbit: Ranked From Worst To Best

6. The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

What The Battle Of The Five Armies has over the preceding Hobbit movies is that it has some semblance of a standard narrative. Following a €˜30€™s serial-style resolution of the previous film, the movie builds a conflict, twists it further, then provides some proper resolution. A three-act structure in a Hobbit movie? Hell must look like the peak of Ravenhill. Sadly, what the final Middle-Earth movie makes up for in having the framing of a proper story, it loses by not having one to fill the template. The central event is a minor part of Tolkien€™s book, a narrative device more than spectacle, and thus, while Jackson endevours to tie the whole thing into the broader Middle-Earth scope, the skirmish feels rather inconsequential to the overarching Hobbit narrative - bar Thorin€™s death nothing that important happens. The big problem with The Battle Of The Five Armies is the battle. Whereas Helms Deep and Pelinnor Fields were expertly constructed, telling a story as much as providing adrenaline, here, with Jackson€™s digital camera swooping through CGI vistas showing indistinct blobs either dying or being ridiculously powerful, it€™s just empty spectacle that pads out the already slight narrative. When the movie pulls away from the (misleadingly two-way) fight, focusing on the individual character arcs, there€™s some genuinely strong moments, which begs the question why the director didn't take a leaf from Tolkien and have the battle be a mere backdrop.
Contributor
Contributor

Film Editor (2014-2016). Loves The Usual Suspects. Hates Transformers 2. Everything else lies somewhere in the middle. Once met the Chuckle Brothers.