This started in 2012 with “An Unexpected Journey”, followed by “The Desolation of Smaug” in 2013 and concluded with “The Battle of The Five Armies” in 2015. It’s the number one movie in the U.S. for several weeks now. Here in Manila, its screening was temporarily discontinued to give way to the Metro Filmfest (except for IMAX), but it’s now back in theatres.
The last installment in the series is darker than the previous two. In the book, it is just one chapter, but here, it’s stretched into two and a half hours. It appears like one long extended war, but without the excellent build up like in “The Two Towers” of “Lord of the Rings”. It starts with the duel between Bard (Luke Evans) and Smaug the dragon in Laketown, which ended the second movie. This is spectacularly executed and the effects are really eye-popping and breath taking.
Then there’s the battle between Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Sauron (voice by Benedict Cumberbatch). And last, between Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) against Azog the Defiler, leader of the Orcs, on a sheet of ice near a frozen waterfall. The director surely does an excellent job in staging the many battle scenes. The viewer gets a good grasp of the position of the armies at the mountain of Erebor and the strategy Azog uses in attacking the men, dwarves and elves.
In the action scenes, no doubt he succeeds, but in coming up with more convincing and more involving relationships between the various characters, his work is quite disappointing. The storytelling rambles on without much sense of urgency. “The Hobbit” series is nowhere as satisfying as “The Lord of the Rings” series even if they were all made by the same people from New Zealand.
Except for Bilbo Baggins (well played by Martin Freeman), you don’t really invest much emotion in any of its characters. To give it an obligatory romantic angle, there is an attempt to link the elf Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and the dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner, this guy shows much promise), but it’s not engagingly developed, what with Legolas (Orlando Bloom) coming in between them. One sad thing here is that Thorin becomes so greedy and, in one sequence, finds himself sucked into a whirlpool of thick molten gold. This is symbolic of Peter Jackson himself. He wants to make more money by making a trilogy out of a small book, and he succeeds as all three “Hobbit” movies are indeed money makers. In the end, no doubt “Lord of the Rings” will have a special place in film history (it even won an Oscar), but we doubt if “The Hobbit” would achieve the same.
