The Desolation of Nostalgia

Rating: 5/10 (16 December 2014)

Peter Jackson finally caps his nearly 2-decade stint in Middle Earth (not counting the odd hiatus here and there) with his shortest film since the late nineties, two and a half hours of "pay-off". I use brackets because the narrative foundations are much less solid than they were in The Return of the King.
In terms of action, Jackson outdoes himself, mostly foregoing the epic sweep of the Rings trilogy for a big messy brawl, though with a sense of geography that helps you keep track of who is where and trying to do what. His inventiveness in these scenes also gives you glimpses of what the Hobbit could have been had it chosen to be a more compact, fun and silly adventure story: dwarf lords riding battle-pigs, war-goats climbing a mountain-fortress, Legolas using a giant bat as a parachute and a demented fight on a collapsed tower (this one is worth the price of admission alone) are all sights to behold, pure entertainment... Jackson certainly has not forgotten how to direct movies. Only how to write them.
Part 1 made a whole fuss about dragons and teased us with shadows and a giant eye, while wasting time in Hobbiton and Rivendel. Part 2 committed the even greater sin of giving us a bit of dragon and denying us his titular desolation, while throwing in a useless love story and more Rings setup intrigue we didn't need - and the less said about Beorn, the better. Along comes part 3, swiftly dispatching the great Smaug before titles even appear on screen to focus on a battle right out of the book's footnotes. Even the title is disingenuous - again! - as of the five armies, two are of orcs and count as the same, and another isn't an army but a crowd of refugees.
The spectacle might be near faultless, but the structure is fatally flawed, cramming in more Lord of the Rings setup and more minor characters devoid of payoff. Now that it is all said and done, making two films out of the Hobbit could have worked, and produced tight and fun experiences. Stretching it to three has resulted in a completely indulgent narrative mess, which allows itself to lose sight of its strongest assets. It's mind-boggling how little of Martin Freeman's Bilbo you actually see in films named after him...
More and more, I hear people compare these films to the Star Wars prequels. While the Hobbit installments are nowhere near the complete artistic disaster that those films where, it does underline the utter pointlessness of prequels. We might want more of the same, especially if it moves the story forward and shows us new things, but we don't need setup for things we've already seen, and perhaps this was inevitable with Jackson at the helm: an irrepressible, natural desire to "tie it all together". Every little thing that turned the Hobbit into a prequel saga to Lord of the Rings made it suffer, and you can't help but imagine what Guillermo Del Toro and a fresh perspective might have done.