My wife and I were in
Pasadena a couple of weeks ago with a friend and we all decided to go
to a showing of The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies.
He'd seen it a few times before, but was fine watching it again—he's
a big Tolkien nut. We had already planned to see it while staying in
LA because, well, we'd seen the first two, and it would have felt
weird not to finish out the trilogy.
For my part, I was
looking forward to it. Contrary to the popular complaint that these
movies are too long, the second film felt too short to me. Once
Smaug took off from the mountain to lay waste to the fishing village
(don't expect me to remember place names—it's been years since
I've read any Tolkien) I was ready for more. I fully expected things
to go on for another hour; but then, what would that leave for the
next installment?
Probably not a lot, and
everyone knows the reason for that. The Hobbit is not
a long book. You can literally read it in one day with time left
over for three meals and a shower, and Tolkien clearly wrote it with
the intention of it being a breezy children's fable that adults could
enjoy as well, probably while reading it aloud at bedtime.
When Guillermo del Toro
was originally slated to direct the Hobbit films with
Peter Jackson producing, he had the right idea about how to bring it
to the screen: do two movies. He believed the book had a perfect
stopping point right in the middle that would make sense as a break
in a duology. It would have saved the trouble of having to bring in
a bunch of other unused material from the Lord of the
Rings books, just to justify padding the movies out to a
trilogy. The Hobbit became three movies because three
are likely to make more money than two would have—I can't imagine
that the decision was made for artistic reasons. Instead of
breeziness, we get an overblown story that takes way longer than it
should to get where it's going, which is nowhere in particular.
No, sorry, I take that
back. Much too flippant of me. Where it's going is into the maw of
CGI monster combat, wave after wave of it, pretty much endless once
it gets up momentum, taking long enough that by the time you're done,
you're exhausted. Not the good exhaustion that comes after
exhilaration, but just tired. While it's obvious filmmakers have to
dramatize books in such a way that they read as decent cinema, this
feels like overkill.
None of this is in the
true spirit of the book, which is quick and to the point, making
these films, for all their reliance on state-of-the-art computer
effects and Jackson's insistence on stretching out every moment from
the source, a bad adaptation of Tolkien's work. It's the wrong
approach.
The jam-packed feel of
this last film should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with
Jackson's work. I don't just mean his Hollywood stuff, but his
entire career. Bad Taste, Dead Alive,
Meet the Feebles—most of his movies
strive for excess. Jackson is at his best when he can find a balance
between his desire to do everything that comes into his head and how
to best tell a story, a standard he more or less sustained through
the three Lord of the Rings movies, which have
deservedly become classics. Battle of Five Armies
is more closely related to Jackson's King Kong, a
bloated, clunky, over-the-top movie that still managed, despite its
faults, to be sporadically entertaining. In a way, it's a very
laudable quality Jackson has; he wants to give the audience their
money's worth, even if that means they have to sit in one place for
four straight hours.
I don't think it's fair
for people to compare these films to the Star Wars
prequel trilogy. Those movies are genuinely ill-conceived and poorly
executed. The Hobbit movies aren't as good as the Lord
of the Rings, but they have some very good
moments, and they're well made for the most part. They do feel a lot
like an afterthought, something Jackson did because he felt he had to
and not because he really had a passion to, but they're not awful;
certainly not Phantom Menace awful. I wish Del Toro
had done these instead of the lunkheaded Pacific Rim,
but what's done is done. And it would have been nice if Jackson
hadn't used more CGI than he used on Lord of the Rings,
which makes the new films a poor visual fit with the older ones—one
thing they do have in common with Lucas' misguided efforts. Some of
the animosity also comes, I think, from the fact that many young
people who saw the Lord of the Rings
movies as kids are seeing these new movies from the perspective of
their twenties, and it's next to impossible to reproduce the sense of
wonder that comes so easily in our early youth. These days the
market is glutted with ultra-expensive sci-fi/fantasy extravaganzas,
causing them to lose some of their luster; way back when the century
was new, they weren't quite so common.
Jackson's a man who
loves his toys, though, with all their high frame rates and 3D
graphics, and he won't keep his hands off them just because it's a
good idea. His most recent attempt at a “smaller” movie, The
Lovely Bones, is apparently as overblown as his other fantasy
films, so I doubt there'll ever be a switch to cheaper,
character-driven projects in the future; he's addicted to special
effects and gizmos, and like any addict, he has to progressively
increase the dose in order to maintain the same high. Chances are,
Jackson's career peaked with Lord of the Rings, and
he'll never again return to that pinnacle, no matter how much money
he throws onto the screen. That isn't such a tragedy, really;
better to achieve greatness and never repeat it than to never achieve
greatness at all, I say. Still, it's too bad the Hobbit films bring
that notion to mind.
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