The saddest casualty of "Battle" is what remained of Peter Jackson's reputation

Rating: 2/10 (30 December 2014)

In his final chance to get it right, Peter Jackson doubles down on all the problems that marred his first two "Hobbit" palimpsests. Although he changed this installment's name from the gentle and reflective "There and Back Again" to the "The Battle of the Five Armies" to better reflect the overstuffed, bludgeoning nature of its content, the title is still a misnomer. The courageous, sympathetic, lovable, surprising Mr. Bilbo Baggins, played by an uninspired Martin Freeman, is too absent and inconsequential to justify being named in the title of Jackson's adaptation. "Thorin: The Battle of the Pixel Armies" would have been closer to the mark. The reliance on animation, always a weak point in Jackson's movies, is more smothering than ever before. An entire character voiced by Billy Connolly, not a dragon or a troll but a human-ish good guy like all the other good guys, is not acted but generated with the putty-skinned, dead-eyed falsity of a video game sprite. Although Weta's computer experts no doubt do the best possible work with existing technology, the digital characters and action and backdrops look as wretched as they always do. When New Zealand's famed landscapes, so expertly employed for "Lord of the Rings," finally appear for a few brief seconds at the end of the film, it is as if they have been imported not only from another movie but from another art form altogether.
So the story is even more non-germane, the characters even more underwritten, and the visuals even further removed from recognizable cinema in the third film than in the first and second. Those are disappointments, but they are not surprises. What is a surprise is the number of inexplicable errors about basic Middle Earth facts. It is one thing to depart from Tolkien's texts; that's a filmmaker's prerogative. Jackson, though, also departs from facts established in his own movies. That's simply bad filmmaking. The first "Hobbit" movie made a major chronological blunder regarding the Witch King, one with profound and irreconcilable implications for the history of Gondor and its rulers, but this could be shrugged off because the relevant events are buried fairly deep in the lore. By contrast, the geographical and chronological mistakes in "Battle of the Five Armies" pertain to the topmost layer of the tale. A citizen of Lake Town says of their Master that he is "halfway down the Anduin by now." The Anduin is the locus of a rather dramatic sequence in Jackson's first Tolkien movie. Because the progress of the questing party is so clearly conveyed in the "Lord of the Rings" movies, the river's position just past the Misty Mountains is obvious even without a map. Lake Town lies on an entirely different river on the opposite side of an enormous forest. This is clear even in Jackson's muddy "Hobbit" films not only because the passing of the Misty Mountains and the forest is a core fact of the narrative but because the map from the published text is shown on screen. Thus the line of dialogue, uttered in passing but so specific in content that it stands out from the bulk of the bland script, is contradicted by story as well as visual.
But if an error of geography seems too obscure to warrant heavy censure, consider a chronological error. This comes near the end, when Legolas is told to seek out a Ranger named Strider. During the events of the Hobbit, Strider was not yet so-called; he was a child not yet 10, and he lived in Rivendell. This is known from the books, of course, but even if we allow that Jackson's films exist in an alternate reality, the problem remains intractable. Strider (Aragorn) specifies his age in Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" script, and Bilbo specifies his as well. Unless we assume that Aragorn became Strider at a much, much younger age, the simple math applies equally to the movies as to the books. Jackson's team knows the lore well—for "Five Armies" they dig up a minor Orc stronghold from the bowels of Tolkien's appendices in order to give Legolas an unnecessary side plot and an even more unnecessary backstory—so how did it come to pass that "The Hobbit" movies make such egregious mistakes that undermine the shared universe of Jackson's acclaimed "Lord of the Rings" trilogy?
Clearly there was an unsteady hand at the tiller. The goodwill that Jackson won with his stellar Tolkien adaptation in the early 2000s is the saddest casualty of his "Battle of the Five Armies."