What a shambles

Rating: 2/10 (10 May 2015)

There are many things wrong with The Battle of the Five Armies, but most of them come down to the screenplay. Right from the first scene and the Master of Laketown ("Faster now, I'm trying to evacuate myself here!"), the dialogue is clunkier than anything I've seen in a big-budget movie in years.
There's an occasional moment (Thorin and Bard parlaying at the gate of the Lonely Mountain) when something of the source material shines through, but there's precious little of Tolkien remaining in this.
The problem is not that a relatively small children's book has been spun out to three long movies. Jackson and Co. have left out a lot of the original story to make way for their many additions; this was most obvious in The Desolation of Smaug, but also applies here. In the book, Beorn's arrival was a pivotal moment in the battle, but he is barely glimpsed in the film, there is no funeral for Thorin (my edition of The Hobbit has a magnificent illustration of this by Alan Lee and it would have been wonderful to see it brought to life), and no final reckoning over what happened to the treasure.
The sub-plot involving the efforts to drive Sauron from Dol Guldur almost works – nice to see Christopher Lee still kicking ass at 92 – but it's not explained why the orc army in the previous film had entirely departed when there were still such powerful adversaries (Gandalf and friends) to be defeated. Much more could have been done with this story, which Tolkien had only sketched lightly. But the real problems are with the main plot. First there's Bard's ludicrous escape from his prison, then his dispatching of Smaug; this should have been a highlight, but was too silly for words.
Meanwhile back on the mountain, Thorin is going mad. The refugees from Laketown descend on Dale, and an army of elves turns up. Much pre-battle jockeying for position ensues. An army of dwarfs arrives, led by Billy Connolly (playing himself) on a pig. Then almost immediately an army of orcs appears over the hill as well. Everyone starts fighting. Some giant worms who seem to have arrived from Planet Arrakis emerge from the ground, chew on some boulders, and are then never seen again. Things are looking really bad, but then Thorin has a psychotic (or possibly psychedelic) episode and suddenly is not crazy any more. He leads his band of 13 dwarfs out of the mountain, and this makes all the difference to the progress of the battle. He then decides to scale a distant peak, where the orc leader, Azog, is directing the battle with flag signals – just the sort of thing orcs would do – and kill said leader. He and some of the dwarfs climb on some big-horned mountain goats (where did they come from?) and charge up the hill.
About this point, Legolas and Tauriel turn up and announce that another army of orcs is heading this way. They'll be arriving from the north, which means that they'll first encounter the peak with the orc command post! Legolas and Tauriel immediately charge up the peak to assist Thorin and Kili, Tauriel's love interest, who's up there too. Oddly, the orc army never arrives; perhaps the worms ate them.
Most of the rest of the action takes place on the peak, which has lots of picturesque ruins with bridges and staircases, plus a frozen lake. Azog kills Kili's brother Fili, then tries to kill Kili, who is rescued by Tauriel, who is then almost killed by Azog, but is rescued by Kili, who this time really does get killed. Or something like that; there are so many fights going on it's hard to keep track.
Legolas is in the fighting as well. At one point he runs up a rock staircase which is in the process of collapsing beneath him. Jackson seems to think that the more outrageous the CG stunts, the more exciting it is for the audience, but many of the sequences are so cartoonish it is obvious they're fake, and there is no danger.
Finally there's the climactic battle on the ice lake between Thorin and Azog. The orc sinks, Leonardo de Caprio-like, through the smashed up lake surface and Thorin watches as a gentle current carries him beneath a solid sheet of ice, apparently dead. But suddenly (who could have foreseen this?) Azog opens his eyes and bursts back through the ice. He stabs Thorin in the chest, but then Thorin stabs Azog, and this time the big orc really is dead. Thorin gets up and wanders around for a bit and finds Bilbo (you remember Bilbo – he's the hobbit – this movie trilogy is called The Hobbit). Thorin apologises to Bilbo for being so mean, before expiring. His death should have been the emotional climax of the film, but ends up as just one more silly episode in a movie full of silly episodes.
We're also supposed to be torn up by the tragic death of the dwarf Kili, and the heartbreak of Tauriel, the elf who loved him, but this relationship is just awkward. In Tolkien's universe, elves and dwarfs are the children of different gods, and fundamentally incompatible.
What else? There's a character called Alfrid, who I think is supposed to be amusing, but is merely irritating. Actually, most of the "humour" is forced. The CG is also really disappointing; the orcs are far less scary than the prosthetic-clad actors of the earlier trilogy.
Did I like anything? Well, there was a nice quiet moment near the end with Bilbo and Gandalf sitting down to catch their breath. And some of the landscapes and interiors looked good. But given the remarkable artistic success of the original Lord of the Rings movies, the Hobbit trilogy has been a huge and bitter disappointment.