![]() ![]() The dragon is hurtling down towards the watery hovels of Laketown, Thorin Oakenshield is getting a little twitchy down in the treasure hoard, and Gandalf is swinging gently in the breeze in an iron cage in Sauron’s ruined castle. The Battle of the Five Armies picks up where Desolation of Smaug leaves off, practically in mid-sentence. Well, the pace doesn’t flag in this final section, even if it’s shorter by almost 20 minutes than either of its two predecessors however, the late-breaking change of title (from the considerably more fey There and Back Again) tells you that heading towards some sort of monumental showdown is this film’s central preoccupation. Applying the same thunderous template to the chirpy Hobbit, however, required adroit footwork to avoid the feeling that the whole thing had been padded out. That’s not to say Jackson’s achievement hasn’t been impressive: the epic potential of The Lord of the Rings was perhaps simple enough to spot, but a monumental effort to pull off. Like Agatha Christie’s detective novels, there would appear little in the way of aesthetic – as opposed to technological – progression having set the tone so definitively at the outset, each film delivered exactly what it promised. ![]() ![]() The first Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, was released almost exactly 13 years ago, in 2001, and the six instalments of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies make up a remarkably homogenous body of work. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies promises to be the New Zealand director’s final excursion into Tolkien territory, and for that some praise is due, for staying the course if nothing else. Well, I can sympathise entirely I reeled out of the cinema in bit of a daze myself after this extended dose of Jackson’s patented ye olde Middle Earth cranium-smashing. The troll, or whatever it is, lies full length on the ground, stunned entirely disregarded as its compadres swarm past. S hortly after the climactic battle scene of this final instalment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit series gets underway, an outsize troll-like monstrosity with a pointed stone headpiece runs full tilt into a fortress wall, making a breach through which a bunch of orcs and other malevolent nasties can pour through. ![]()
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