So The Hobbit trilogy has ended, Peter Jackson has finally ended his Middle-Earth adventure, but unlike the first Lord of the Rings trilogy this one has ended... badly.
I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A series of monstrous films made from acclaimed "unfilmable" tomes from JRR Tolkien, directed by a man who had no practice in making such massive epics, a man who made trashy gore movies, and on a shoe-string budget (at least for the scale of the project!) It became probably the best adaptation Hollywood will ever make.
But The Hobbit, as everyone has said, has been developed into a long... long... long overextended franchise spanning three films while only being based off a short children's book that Tolkien wrote before Lord of the Rings, long before anyone asked him to write an epic. Yet when Peter Jackson returned, and due to Rings success, he wanted to make a charming children's book into the same sort of epic battle trilogy.
You cannot do this, and the final chapter The Battle of the Five Armies proves that all the doubt during the first two films was true.
I read up on my Tolkien lore. Original Tolkien lore, written before the films were made, and I would like to share some of the glaring inconsistencies that bothered me so much as to make The Battle of the Five Armies (and by extension The Hobbit trilogy) the worst the franchise has to offer.
If you have read The Hobbit, you will know a lot of these already and hopefully agree with me, if you haven't seen the films (or read the book) I will warn you that there are spoilers ahead!
Tauriel and Legolas
Tauriel annoys me, she annoys me a lot and not just because I have to keep checking the spelling of her name on IMDB, but because she is (unlike anything else in the entire film franchise) completely made up; she does not exist in the books, or the expanded lore. Why? Because we need an action girl, because Tolkien was writing books about war and high adventure in a time when men were at the forefront of such things.
Sure, I'm all for strong female characters, I could even accept them inventing someone to fill the role (I didn't mind the changes to Arwen's story in the Rings trilogy) but only if the character was actually relevant. Tauriel's two narrative functions in the story are A: to be involved in a love triangle and B: need rescuing.
Top quality writing there guys. Shoehorn in a female role model only to reduce her to the worst stereotypes in Hollywood.
Legolas never featured in the original Hobbit story, why would he? Certainly Jackson had a thread of connectivity for Legolas, the character's father The Elven King Thranduil was involved in The Hobbit story and the battles.
So when Legolas is shown in The Battle of the Five Armies killing the orc leader Bolg, you can rest assured he never did that, nor did he rescue the non-existent Tauriel.
Add to this the fact that these characters are effectively the same archetype, so having two of them is inherently unnecessary.
Azog and Thorin
Let's put aside the ghastly CGI work that has befallen the orc characters for a moment and talk about them, because there's great whopping errors here.
Azog is determined to be the worst of the worst in The Hobbit's film interpretation; he hounds the dwarf company all the way to the gates of Erebor and even has a score to settle against dwarven prince Thorin. He leads the orc army in the Battle of the Five Armies, and even seems to reside in the evil, abandoned fortress of Dol Guldur.
Azog died 150 years before the events of The Hobbit.
He was killed in the Battle of Azanulbizar (the same battle showing him paradoxically victorious in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) by none other than Dain Ironfoot, he being the dwarf played by Billy Connelly in Battle of the Five Armies film. Dain had been seeking revenge on Azog for slaying the Dwarf King Thror in events prior.
Still with me?
In short: Thorin never killed Azog, Azog never featured in the story.
Bolg and Beorn
Now Bolg, the handsome chap with the metal in his body. Bolg is Azog's son, and was the sole leader of the orcs during the Battle of the Five Armies. Perhaps seeking vengeance for Azog's death.
Perhaps just for kicks.
Bolg was not killed by Legolas, as shown in the film, since Legolas wasn't there. In the book, Bolg in fact was killed by Beorn, the shape-shifting wildman who was in the second film The Desolation of Smaug. Beorn is shown air-dropping into the battle via Eagles in the third film... but little else after that.
Why wasn't Bolg the sole leader for the orcs? You probably know Jackson's reasoning. And why not keep Beorn killing him? Beorn being the defender of the woodland realm as in the text its says:
"He came alone, and in bear's shape; and he seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath."
He even recovers the dying prince Thorin!
Galadriel, Elrond, the Necromancer, Gandalf, the Ringwraiths and a lot of nonsense
I honestly found myself surprised at how much venom I have built up over this particular scene. I guess it is because I felt this subplot with The Necromancer was the reason for The Hobbit to be expanded into three films and yet... this is all we get? A pointless stand off between undying Ringwraiths (who correctly did inhabit Dol Guldur at first) and a host of fan-service returning characters: Saruman, Galadriel and Elrond... all who obviously don't die.
The sheer lack of threat in this scenario is mind-boggling and does very little to give us more than what was already told earlier.
Gandalf's capture is false (so the trio's rescue was not required) though he did single-handedly discover that The Necromancer was in fact Sauron. Dol Guldur was not "dealt with" until the War of the Ring much later. There's no evidence that the three other extremely powerful characters were involved at all...
Smaug's Demise
The film's interpretation of this scene greatly frustrated me, mostly because it lacked harmony with the film trilogy's own made-up concepts and lacked the book's poetry and simplicity.
See the picture above? That is close to what happens in the book. Bard is regarded as one of the best bowmen in the land, hence his title: Bard the Bowman. Bard faces off alone against the terrible dragon and with all his arrows spent he has one last attempt with his oldest and most worn arrow, his black arrow. With the aid of a thrush that had overheard Bilbo and Smaug's conversation in Erebor (don't you snigger, the thrush even featured in the first film An Unexpected Journey!) he knew of the dragon's weak spot and that faithful arrow found its mark and ended Smaug.
"Arrow! Black Arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the mountain, go now and speed well!"
Poetry.
However.
In the second film, The Desolation of Smaug, it establishes Black Arrows as giant iron arrows designed specifically to pierce dragon hide... Okay... We see the last remaining Black Arrow upon the roof of The Master of Laketown's house, loaded into some sort of catapult... Okay...
The lead up to Smaug's final scene in The Battle of the Five Armies we have Bard initially firing his arrows at Smaug, accurate to the book, we even have him fire a blackened, withered old arrow last, but it fails also.
But then his son appears with the huge iron arrow. Smaug destroys Bard's bow, tearing it in half. So Bard, surreally, stakes both ends of his bow into the solid wooden beams of a bell tower so that the string stretches between them, he then rests the huge iron Black Arrow on his own son's shoulder to aim at the approaching Smaug.
What...
What??
To me that change, and so early in the third film too, proves everything wrong with this project of Peter Jackon's, the idea of pulling a children's book into a eight hour epic. Why did that have to be so hilariously stupefying to see? Why couldn't Bard simply be a damn good archer? Why have the black arrow reinvented as some Dragon-Slaying Arrows when Smaug has a weakness to exploit already!?
Honestly these are only some of the huge errors that feature, especially if you consider the entire trilogy! I've not spoken about how the barrel scenario in the book was turned from a quiet, stealthy and shadowy escape into a lengthy daytime cartoon action sequence befitting of a rollercoaster resort in The Desolation of Smaug.
Or how the Rock Giants in An Unexpected Journey was a huge action sequence that risked the lives of the entire cast, whereas in the book it is literally just a passing statement:
"When he peeped out in the lightning flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game."
Sounds like the producers of the films were making a game out of it all! A game with my patience!
There's nothing quite like watching a Coen Brothers' film.
A straight-laced, kind hearted father and husband working as a mathematician finds his life suddenly collapsing around him after a series of troubles. Without a sense of determination, faith or self, he begins to seek meaning from the madness.
On paper, and in synopsis, A Serious Man had the potential to be one of my favourite films of the year (and I've certainly been meaning it watch it for the last four years!); the Coen Brothers have made some great stories that I really enjoy (The Hudsucker Proxy and Fargo being two) but their films often stray into the too ambiguous to really grab your attention. This one is more towards the latter.
Of course, The Coen Brothers can make very divisive films, and you should take my opinion and the opinions of others with some reservations.
A Serious Man follows the life of Larry Gopnik and his family's petty trials and tribulations that begin to consume and overwhelm him, we watch a tapestry of life unfold from a single perspective and that makes it a very ambiguous endeavour!
I understood that this was the point and the theme of the film: life can sometimes be hard and very uncompromising. Larry himself says, in his defence of the misfortune happening around him: "But I've not done anything!" and that, in itself, was the point.
Larry's attempts to find meaning and answers within his Jewish faith leads him to even more ambiguity, yet this religious satire is a strong element in the film. Even religions aren't meant to give answers, but simply ways to deal with life's problems.
There's a lot of life's more curious and surreal events, the idea that nothing is coincidence and that there are real consequences to every decision you make even if you never see the cause and effect yourself. It is an intellectual's comedy film about the quandaries of life, and I completely bought into it.
But it just didn't quite grab me enough. I suspect it requires repeated viewing or lengthy debate; people can talk about it for days if they were to give it a chance. But giving it the benefit of the doubt is difficult at first, likely for a lot of audiences... the opening twenty minutes are slow and only offer morsels of intrigue that resurface much later, it doesn't have snappy dialogue or jazzy quirkiness like a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film.
But it does have a lot to say, and everything it says is neatly packaged within ambiguity and subtly. There's a good cast of actors that will have you looking up IMDB (yes, that was the guy from Big Bang Theory) who all deliver neat performances. Nothing feels out of place and the pacing was great.
It is a little bit too ambiguous for me though!
How... how does one explain this film in sensible words?
A young boy in American suburbia gets the feeling there's something wrong with everyone around him, even his sister and his parents. The film opens with him speaking to a psychologist who he also doesn't trust... He could just be going insane, or the upper class "society" truly is disturbed...
This film was happily suggested by a Cinema Cocoa fan... and I am sooooooo happy with that person's decision to tell me about it. It wasn't even easy to find, let alone watch, there are no copies on Netflix.
Now I should say this film isn't exactly... awful, but it has dated a lot and has a lot of ridiculously bad acting. It feels like the love child of a bad X-Files episode, Saved by the Bell and The Thing.
Yeah, it is a horror film, specifically a body horror film. But you wouldn't know it until the final twenty minutes, when everything goes completely surreal and very grotesque.
You're only other hint would be the opening; while seeing our protagonist Billy running around in his family's house at night wielding a kitchen knife. A fairly standard thriller opening? Like a television episode. But the opening credit sequence is weird and unsettlingly abstract orgy visual, imagine a HR Giger painting of an orgy but tinted blood red.
Yeah... So when the film progresses with a paranoid Billy living between defending his sister from another boy's advances and his school representative meetings, you know something is going to happen later. Sure, things are strange throughout: a secret tape recording of his family supposedly talking about incest; his sister's body contorting impossibly. It is a sexually confused storyline, fuelled by Billy's own teenage feelings.
All of this fluff that makes ninety percent of the film is very tiresome late-eighties child acting. There are no familiar faces in this movie, Billy is played by Billy Warlock was a star in Baywatch, but the others have only been in other obscure horror flicks.
The entire film is directly made for the final scene's shock value. If you have seen the sort of practical effects John Carpenter used in The Thing, this is similar. It is a gory, vile and sexually grotesque scenario where bodies are torn apart, merged together and divided apart into putrid abstract shapes and forms. I cannot imagine filming or "acting" throughout all of that.
Really, watch The Thing. It is a far, far, far better film and provides the same level (if not better) gory practical effects. Anything more than its gore and shock value would be a limited paranoia story and a subtext of upper class society suffocating the lower classes...
It is an immature, badly made 80s teenage gore film. If you like your obscure horror movies and watch all the old video-nasties, Society might be for you. Otherwise... you can safely forget about this review!
It is great to see Joaquin Phoenix back, and it is even better to see him deliver one of his best performances in a very honest, clever love story.
Unable to commit to signing his devoice papers, a writer seeks companionship after breaking up with his wife through a new computer system with advanced artificial intelligence.
I am not one for watching romantic dramas, or rom-coms, or frankly any film that revolves solely around a relationship triangle... I find them often trite and predictable.
But occasionally one comes along that isn't trite, that prefers to be quirky or beautifully honest with what it is talking about. Love can be a mushy and gaudy subject on film, but I am happy to say that Spike Jonze's Her is subtle, downplayed and dives into many different aspects of a relationship.
The premise sounds goofy, and at times it is deliberately seen as a perplexing idea. A man dates a computer? Really?
But the metaphor is solid. Samantha (the name the operating system OS1 gave herself upon being asked) is represented by voice only, played by Scarlett Johansson, and here's where, for me, the honesty comes into play.
Our protagonist, Theodore, is lonely and wants physical connection with someone. But as the story progresses he sees that simply having someone to talk to, to share things with and someone to listen to is all he needs.
Of course, there's a lot more going on than just that. The film feels like a narrow slice, a cross-section of a much larger futurescape that Spike Jonze has written; we see technology from a very hands-on and domestic perspective that might not be that far from reality.
When considered in this way, Theodore's relationship is unexpected but completely believable in the film's setting and, more importantly, our future.
It also has a great supporting cast, I kept noticing familiar faces especially Tron Legacy's Olivia Wilde and Guardians of the Galaxy's Chris Pratt.
It is an incredibly simple and honest story about what can happen during relationships, but with an almost contemporary science fiction quirk driving it along. You can see why it won the Academy Award for Original Screenplay.
I recommend it for a quiet, thoughtful, loving and often morose experience one evening.
It is quite an achievement, considering how much my fondness for the Lord of the Rings franchise has been slowly but surely worn away.
With Smaug the Magnificent bearing down on Lake Town, Thorin Oakenshield and his dwarves having occupied the fortress of Erebor and the Orc armies closing in, Bilbo finds himself at the centre of a massive battlefield.
There's very little to actually say about this, storywise, but can you blame me? This film is based around about ten pages of book!
It feels like the equivalent of walking in on Return of the Jedi as the rebel fleet attacks the Death Star, or when Gondor falls under siege in Return of the King.
The folly of director Peter Jackson's decision to turn a children's book into a seven hour epic has been fully realised here, making The Battle of the Five Armies quite possibly the worst entry in the franchise (and that is only because of An Unexpected Journey's sheer nostalgia factor) this so-called "Defining Chapter" is little more than a CG infested battle sequence, living up to its name perhaps but definitely failing to feel important or relevant.
It has been a year, you could say the flow has been broken.
The Battle of the Five Armies, in the book, is a brief affair since the story is told only from Bilbo's perspective (the book is called The Hobbit, after all) and he is swiftly knocked unconscious and misses the entire battle. The makes this film's existence the most perplexing and the most difficult to sell, but it appears Jackson has taken this issue and ran with it as an excuse show Legolas doing more crazy gravity defying stunts, to cast Billy Connelly as a battle frenzied dwarf and have a lot of replicated computerised orcs.
Of course there are moments. Richard Armitage plays the murky psyche of Thorin Oakenshield perfectly; this is a storm that has been given time to build and provides this film's only sense of gravity and finality. Smaug, as with the book, remains the reason we are watching despite lasting a pitiful ten minutes here (consider him used like the Balrog fight in The Two Towers) and the film is worse off for not having him longer.
Luke Evans as Bard the Bowman continues to be excellent in the role given to him in the second film, Bard who becomes a valiant hero in the book by the end. Yet, by the power of the trilogy's bafflingly silly screenplay Bard's stand off with Smaug is made ridiculously stupid, making one of the book's other exciting moments more of an eyebrow-raising absurdity.
It also still has the performances, though some are decidedly just there for cameos, the look and feel of the other films, which maintains a level of quality despite all of the flaws.
Even the other reason for making three films, The Necromancer, feels woefully swept under the carpet; reduced down to a rather silly rescue mission featuring the lady Galadriel, lord Elrond and Ragagast the Brown.
Now I am sure people will defend the film, but I honestly struggle to imagine how. This is a conclusion, literally the third act that The Desolation of Smaug was lacking. It fails as a singular film, lacking any new characters or developments that allow it to have its own style or merit, and would only benefit from watching back-to-back with its predecessor.
The way that Desolation has ended made me suspect this sort of palaver would follow, but I had hoped I'd be proven wrong.
Someone needs to make an edit of these films and condense them down to about four hours, because having seen them all I can safely say it can be done. Right now, I have no desire to watch any of them again except the second one.
A compelling piece of history and a story worth telling, Cumberbatch is excellent but I felt the experience was let down by a very "convenient" screenplay.
Based off the book "Alan Turing: The Enigma" based off the true story of the mathematician who broke the infamous Nazi cypher machine known as The Enigma Machine in World War 2. Benedict Cumberbatch in the leading role and Keira Knightley and Charles Dance co-starring.
The knowledge of Turing's involvement, the existence of his code-cracking machine and its pivotal role in the success against the Nazis were kept secret for fifty years, making both the film and the book it is based upon incredibly insightful and important.
The title refers to Turing's complex machine, the first ever computer, and his desire to create an imitation of a human's brain, a thought provoking piece of history in today's heavily computerised society.
But the film isn't all about computers and code breakers, it is more about Turing himself, and Cumberbatch brings everything to the performance and creates a very complex and convincing character. Turing is an awkward yet vastly intelligent, egotistical to a point, and frail man who has constant battles of will with everyone between him and his own goals. He and Charles Dance have a great aggression going on here, Dance as the military commander Denniston and much like a unrelenting schoolmaster with the younger mathematicians under his sway. Convincing anyone to believe in his machine is only half of Turing's battle, his homosexuality in 1940s society ready to ruin his life and career should anyone discover it.
The Imitation Game is a good historical drama and a great biopic, but I wouldn't say it was a successful "thriller" or as complex as it maybe should have been. The story being told in flashback isn't a problem, in fact I welcomed it as it kept the pacing fluid, but the screenplay itself felt very shorthand. Characters sometimes have wild changes of heart between scenes, especially Matthew Goode's character Hugh who acts as Turing's rival code breaker at first but for little reason suddenly backs him at the crisis point, along with everyone else, "I am Spartacus" style.
But it did what good historical dramas can do, it taught me something and was compelling enough to not become laborious. It starts off quite awkwardly (oh look, it is Tywin Lannister arguing with Sherlock Holmes) and continues to be a little familiar, but it takes to the skies in the third act with the real themes of the movie coming to fruition. All of my mild cynicism had melted away by the film's conclusion.
Well worth a watch, maybe not cinema-worthy but definitely a rental; very well acted, well paced and it is an important story to be sure. Just forgive some debatable characterisation and shorthand script work here and there.
