‘Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies’ more of a head trip than a war
Judging from the title, it might seem safe to assume that “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,” the concluding instalment in Peter Jackson’s latest trilogy of films based on the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien, would arrive as something of a war film, Middle-earth style.
But Jackson insists that the blockbuster fantasy, which opens in theatres Dec. 17, is far more interested in charting the descent of proud dwarf Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) into a crippling madness than it is in conjuring images of battlefield brutality.
“It’s very much like a thriller. That’s the tone of it,” Jackson said, speaking by phone from New Zealand, where he was in the final throes of completing the film. “I’m not letting that tone go for a second. It gives me a chance to feel like I’m making a different movie, not something that has the familiar elements that we’ve had in the past.”
The knotty pathways of Middle-earth have become a second home to Jackson, 53, who has spent more than a decade bringing the f araway land to life on the screen with his “Lord of the Rings” films and the “Hobbit” movies, earning critical acclaim and an outsized cinematic reputation along the way.
The final “Hobbit” instalment, “The Battle of the Five Armies,” represents the culmina- tion of a life’s work in a certain way.
Centring on the concluding portion of Tolkien’s landmark 1937 youth novel, the story picks up where last year’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” ends, with dwarf king Thorin and company, accompanied by Martin Freeman’s good-natured hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, having reclaimed the treasure of their lost homeland Erebor from the evil dragon (Benedict Cumberbatch).
A vengeful Smaug heads to Lake-town to decimate the nearby village of Men, and the destruction the dragon causes leaves the townspeople insisting upon recompense from the dwarfs.
Jackson said he’s spent much of the year focused on editing the movie and completing the visual effects . “I found my rhythm in a way. I understood where we were going with these characters. We weren’t discovering it along the way. We started out doing a little bit of that in the beginning. We now knew who everyone was and what they represented and could really kind of crank it up. The making of it felt very different to me than the other ones.”
Jackson said he’s made an effort to keep the film from feeling ponderous or overly long, and expects it to be the shortest of his six Tolkien movies.