A trilogy that shouldn't have been

Rating: 5/10 (12 June 2020)

Since Peter Jackson's highly anticipated, yet underwhelming, return to Middle-Earth in 2012 with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, many devout fans have given Peter Jackson the benefit of a very substantial doubt that he could still churn out an outstanding Tolkien film, myself included. But with Bilbo's swan song here, that hope is sadly extinguished, like the glory and splendor of the town of Dale.
The Battle of the Five Armies suffers from that which plagued The Hobbit trilogy since the beginning: bloated excess and a complete lack of focus. How Jackson and Warner Bros. justified stretching Tolkien's breeziest, most accessible text into three movies will forever escape me.
The film opens where The Desolation of Smaug should have closed, had Jackson shown just a hint of economy with this trilogy, as that silver-tongued dragon lays waste to Laketown and subsequently falls to the arrow of Bard the Bowman. Bilbo, our supposedly titular hero, is yet again sidelined in favor of Thorin and his merry band. This is surely Jackson's biggest folly throughout this trilogy. Too often it has felt that we are watching The Dwarf instead of The Hobbit. Martin Freeman was never given the chance to truly come into his own as Bilbo Baggins, though he hardly be faulted for that. He gave the character everything that he could, and in the few instances where he has been allowed to shine, Freeman knocks it out of the park.
The eponymous battle also disappoints. It does not nearly match the action, bravura, or emotional stakes raised by, say, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in Return of the King or Balin's Tomb in Fellowship of the Ring. Instead we are presented with something that looks more appropriate as a video game cutscene as thousands of faceless Elves, Dwarves, Men, and Orcs slam into each other. Yet Jackson eschews much of the climactic battle in favor of one-on-one fisticuffs between Thorin and his CG Orc nemesis, Azog, as well as the inexplicably shoehorned Legolas in an overwrought, physics-defying deathmatch that spawns more eye-rolling. We never get the impression that there is much at stake, nor the understanding that Elf, Dwarf, and Man put aside petty squabbles and greed to unite against a greater enemy, a point that Tolkien so beautifully delivered.
In the end, I just did not care about what happened to these characters. I wanted to love these films, as I loved The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gone are the days, it seems, in which Peter Jackson was wholly invested in bringing Middle-Earth to vivid life. Here he has fallen prey to the George Lucas effect. I longed for the gorgeous aerial shots and locations in New Zealand as opposed to endless over-polished glistening greenscreen cinematography. I miss the outstanding prosthetics and make-up that have been forsaken for CGI. For my part, there is no soul in this Hobbit, and the end result begs the question: If Guillermo del Toro had stayed in the director's chair, what would he have done differently?