The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
Directed by Peter Jackson
Following Smaug's attack on Laketown, Bilbo and the dwarves try to defend Erebor's mountain of treasure from others who claim it: the men of the ruined Laketown and the elves of Mirkwood. Meanwhile an army of Orcs led by Azog the Defiler is marching on Erebor, fueled by the rise of the dark lord Sauron. Dwarves, elves and men must unite, and the hope for Middle-Earth falls into Bilbo's hands.
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What critics say influenced The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Directed by Peter Jackson
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In a deft touch, the filmmakers evoke Thorin’s “dragon sickness” — the pernicious effect on a dwarvish heart of treasure over which a dragon has long brooded — with an initially subtle effect recalling the moment in The Fellowship of the Ring where Bilbo at Rivendell manifested a flash of Gollum-like rage at the sight of the Ring.
Not just the elements that indicate this is all one giant story, or even conceptual rhymes, but moments that feel outright stolen from Jackson’s original cinematic triumphs: Gandalf dangling, grubby and defeated, off the side of a wizard’s high tower in a tiny metal cage, as he did in The Fellowship Of The Ring.
There’s little emotion of the kind Jackson evoked, to such great effect, when the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) was thought to have fallen to his death, at the hands — er, tail — of the balrog in “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”
But compare these duels with the cave troll fight in The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).
(Set before the events of The Fellowship of the Ring, we’re constantly reminded that a great evil is coming, heralded by these uggos.
Recall that An Unexpected Journey opened with old hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm)—moments from reconnecting with the wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) in The Fellowship of the Ring —beginning a lengthy reminiscence about the days of the dragon Smaug (brilliantly voiced and motion-captured by Benedict Cumberbatch), the dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), and the precious golden ring that made its way as if by fate to the younger Bilbo’s (Martin Freeman) hands after he reluctantly embarked on an eventful quest.
Try as he might to re-spark the Middle-Earth magic, though, Jackson has produced something closer in spirit to the Star Wars prequels—an inferior second trilogy that replaces tactile wonders with flat CGI attractions, reduces a fully realized fantasy world to a series of digital screen savers, and nods constantly to the better movies that came before.
Jackson created an empire, but like George Lucas with Star Wars before him, his Lord of the Rings movies had a scrappy personality that mitigated (for many) their place as product.
Lee's been in "The Lord of the Rings," "Star Wars" and a James Bond movie.
If the Smaug havoc recalls Fritz Lang’s fantastical Die Nibelungen diptych, this grandiose blitzkrieg seems like a riff on Akira Kurosawa’s Ran with its symmetrical attack formations, stirring forward charges, and sobering body count.
Akira Kurosawa once told me that when he designed the color-coded armies in Ran , he used ideas he’d developed for an aborted adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.”
Like George Lucas before him, Jackson has unmistakably brushed up on his Kurosawa, and there is at least one image here — of elf warriors leaping over the backs of dwarves and into a head-on orc charge — that could pass as an outtake from “Ran.”
The ultimate grudge match between Azog and Thorin is like Eisenstein’s ice battle from Alexander Nevsky done in miniature, with a spooky lyricism all its own.
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For 90 years critics have lamented the loss of Erich Von Stroheim’s eight-hour cut of Greed , his adaptation of Frank Norris’ 375-page novel McTeague.
While watching them, I couldn't help but compare them to the likes of what Spielberg accomplished in "Saving Private Ryan" (I know, vastly disparate genres) where the action was intense, gripping and surprisingly intimate with the characters we cared about.
When a horde of slavering orcs and goblins force the squabbling parties to unite, the screen is filled to bursting with flashing blades and fantastical creatures, including giant rock-eating worms straight out of Frank Herbert's "Dune."
It’s kind of like — to switch genres — what Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day, how after that one glorious perfect day with Andie MacDowell, he tried to force that same relaxed romance in future reiterations of that day.
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A lot of the digital riding stock — rams, an elk, trolls — have the jerky movement of critters from the stop-motion animated “Jason and the Argonauts” fifty years ago.
Armies swoop towards one another across a vast plain, each group displaying their own intricate maneuvers and battle strategies, wielding their own specific weaponry, making one think it could be a deleted scene from John Woo's "Red Cliff," or that a fussy Middle Earth equivalent of John Keegan had been a consultant on the film, providing information on how the dwarf infantry worked, and how the elves moved in formation.