The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies Spoilers - 12 Major Revelations Reviewed

10. Thorin Goes Mad

The Hobbit is a very obvious - sledge-hammer, house-brick through the forehead obvious in fact - allegory for the dangers of coveting material wealth. Just as The Lord Of The Rings explores the issues of industrialism and the impact on Nature, its predecessor was less specifically focused with a "gold is bad" warning that manifests itself in the curse of the dwarf hoard. In the film, this "dragon sickness" as it is rather poetically labelled is depicted in Thorin's struggle to remain himself in the face of the vast wealth: almost immediately after Smaug is defeated he is poisoned by greed, wracked with suspicions against the rest of his company and even more grumpy than he already was. Ultimately Bilbo and the other dwarves challenge his behaviour, staging an intervention that sees him wrestle with his sickness in a very obvious drug sequence (with some suitably trippy effects) before coming to his senses by finding the hero inside. It's all very romantic. The problem is that Richard Armitage probably wasn't the best man for the job of selling this key aspect of the story: his default setting of angry at everything wasn't dramatically different to his dragon sickness method, and it could have been a lot more engaging in someone else's hands.