The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies’ Ten Years Later

Ten years ago, ‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies’ was released, bringing the three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel to an end.

As sequels to the incredibly popular ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, these three movies should have been big hits, but while they were fairly big at the box office, they missed the mark with fans, failing to live up to the success of their predecessors. As the final movie in the trilogy, ‘Battle of the Five Armies’ should have been a triumphant finale, but instead it fell flat. So what went wrong? And has time made this movie better?

The film actually has quite a strong opening, with Smaug attacking Lake Town and reducing it to rubble. It’s a great scene, but should really have been the finale of the second movie ‘The Desolation of Smaug’. As it is, while the scene’s well executed and is probably the strongest part of the movie, it feels more like something to be rushed through, rather than an important part of the story, and feels out of place here. 

The actual finale of this movie, the titular Battle of the Five Armies, is a massive fight scene that probably eclipses Helm’s Deep in scale, but unlike that battle, it doesn’t come with any of the emotional weight, narrative importance, or outright spectacle that makes it so special.

The battle sees a clash between the armies of Dwarves, Elves, Men, and Orcs, as they all converge on the Lonely Mountain. The problem is that there isn’t the same kind of stakes as in ‘The Two Towers’. The main motive for war is the gold that’s inside the mountain. There’s no struggle of good vs evil, no fight against the forces of Saruman and Sauron. It’s just greed driving all parties. 

I think this could have worked if it had been done differently. The problem is that ‘The Hobbit’ isn’t really an epic story. It’s far smaller in scale than ‘Lord of the Rings’ and deals mainly with the personal journey of Bilbo Baggins, from being a home-loving Hobbit, living a complacent life in the Shire, to going on an adventure to help Thorin and the dwarves retake their home, and discovering the courage and resilience he always possessed. Most of the story is told from his perspective, and is far removed from the story of ‘Rings’, where failure means the very real possibility of Middle-earth falling under Sauron’s control.

It’s a small and personal story of an ordinary person which should be kept small and intimate. It’s similar to what happened with Walden Media’s adaptations of ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’ a few years earlier. After the success of ‘Lord of the Rings’, they tried to copy their style for these movies, and ended up turning Narnia into a pale imitation of Middle-earth. Rather than focussing on the small, and often quaint, things that made these stories so special, they went all-in on huge battles, heavy effects, and sweeping vistas to show the scale of everything, completely missing the essence of the books.

A similar thing happens here. ‘The Hobbit’ is often seen as an introduction to Middle-earth before embarking on the much bigger task of reading ‘Lord of the Rings’. It’s a smaller book with a simpler story, and is often considered a children’s book. As a result it’s much more digestible. Most of the things in the movie are out of sync with that. All of the scenes featuring Gandalf and the White Council fighting the Necromancer don’t fit, and were likely left out by Tolkien for good reason. They make the story too dark and offer a stark and uneasy contrast to Bilbo’s travels, which certainly isn’t helped by the constant use of humor in so many scenes, often of a slapstick or childish nature.

It’s understandable why, given the extra space, the movie works to expand on several characters who weren’t given much time in the book, like Bard the Bowman, while also going deeper with Thorin’s story and his obsession with the Arkenstone. However, some characters, like Alfrid, are given far too much screentime for what they actually do, and the inclusion of Legolas and Tauriel, with the unconvincing love triangle involving Kili, feels forced in to pad out the run time. 

Yes, these things could be seen as working the story more closely in with ‘Lord of the Rings’, bringing in some characters from that story and detailing how Sauron returned, but it all comes across as filler, with no proper effect on the main plot, which is about a group of dwarves fighting a dragon. Much like the book, if all of the scenes with Gandalf and Radagast were removed, it would have no effect at all on Bilbo’s adventure.

I do give some leniency to the writers, as Tolkien’s work can be hard to adapt. Bilbo doesn’t come across as a normal hero, as he doesn’t go through any of the tropes, like killing the main villain. In fact, in the book, he’s unconscious for the majority of the final battle. But the problem is that I know the filmmakers could do better, because they did it before.

It makes it a bigger shame when you think of how good these movies could have been. With the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, Peter Jackson made some truly monumental pieces of cinema history. The fact that he brought back most of the same crew, including the writers, for these movies seems like a recipe for success, sadly, though, that didn’t work out.

Who can say where it all really went so wrong? Maybe it was that the project changed directors, originally going ahead under Guillermo Del Toro, who pulled out before shooting began, leaving Jackson to take over. Or the decision to make it into three movies, which certainly didn’t help, as this is a relatively short book compared to ‘Rings’, and doesn’t have the same narrative weight to support such a strung-out trilogy. Perhaps it suffers from coming after such a brilliant trilogy, which it can never truly escape from being compared to?

As a movie in its own right, there are some moments that are good fun, with plenty of action scenes and spectacle, but it lacks the emotion of the originals. There’s no connection to these characters or the journey that they are going on, and all the extra baggage only serves to take the focus off the title character, Bilbo Baggins.

It also doesn’t help that there’s so much CGI used onscreen in place of practical effects, sets, models, and prosthetics. Every scene is coated in VFX, which gives it an unreal look and unnatural feel that spreads into everything, giving us moments such as Legolas defying the laws of physics to leap up a pile of falling stones. These kinds of scenes pull you right out of the movie as you know, fantasy or not, they could never happen, and are a stark contrast to the practical nature of the first trilogy, whose real locations and huge sets gave them a visceral feeling that fully immersed you into the world of Middle-earth.

Perhaps this movie could have been saved if it had just been the second part of a duology, or if some of the excess runtime had been chopped down by cutting out things like Legolas and Tauriel. Or maybe if the final fight had been between Thorin and Bolg, avenging their dead father, rather than the bland and intimidating Azog, it would have hit harder.

As it is, we’ll probably never get to find out, and we’ll certainly never get a ‘Hobbit’ movie that will be an equal to ‘Lord of the Rings’. The age of studios spending big on fantasy movies is over, and there are few filmmakers who could have done it justice more than Peter Jackson.

In so many ways, this movie, and the entire ‘Hobbit’ trilogy, stands as something of a monument to what could have been and almost was, but was just a stretch too far. You can’t catch lightning in the same bottle twice, and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ came along at the perfect time, in the early 2000s when practical and digital effects were more or less equals, and could be combined to make something truly special. Under those conditions, with a lot of skill and hard work, and an insane amount of luck and coincidence, the filmmakers were able to create three movie that will stand forever as spectacular pieces of cinema history.

If nothing else, the ‘Hobbit’ only makes the ‘Rings’ trilogy look even more amazing and reinforces just how lucky we are to have those movies. Hopefully, as Warner Bros. gets ready to make more movies set in Middle-earth, they’ll have learnt their lesson about how it can all go so horribly wrong and won’t make the same mistakes again.