During the 2004 Oscar season, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King pulled off a rare clean sweep of every Academy Award it was nominated for, including Best Picture and Best Director for Peter Jackson. A decade later, it was quite a different story for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the finale of Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. That film only received a single nomination for Best Sound Editing, and it didn’t win.
So why wasn’t The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies as beloved as The Return of the King? We’re revisiting this question because The Battle of the Five Armies hit theaters 10 years ago this month. This is also a timely question considering that the animated film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, will be out in theaters later this month as well.
In retrospect, Jackson faced an uphill battle from the start, but he and his collaborators, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, made a few missteps of their own that contributed to the less enthusiastic response that The Battle of Five Armies received.
The cast is immaculate
One area where The Hobbit films did not disappoint is the cast. Martin Freeman, one of the stars of the original version of The Office, was well-chosen to play a young Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit at the center of the story. Freeman captures Bilbo’s humanity and compassion, as well as his willingness to embrace the adventure alongside a group of dwarves.
Richard Armitage also brought a lot of gravitas to the exiled dwarf king, Thorin Oakenshield, who doesn’t always see eye to eye with Bilbo. That personality conflict boils over in this film, but their eventual reconciliation is one of the movie’s more affecting moments. Jackson also brought back a handful of cast members from his earlier films, including Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey. That was a wise choice, but bringing Orlando Bloom in to reprise his role as Legolas might have been a step too far. He really seems out of place in all of his scenes across the newer trilogy.
The director switch
Jackson was originally planning to step aside and let Guillermo del Toro direct a two-film adaptation of The Hobbit. Del Toro remains a credited screenwriter alongside Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens on the three films that followed, but he departed the project after it faced numerous delays. That’s when Jackson stepped in to take over the films.
Few, if anyone, would have argued against Jackson returning to the world of Middle-earth. The Lord of the Rings trilogy set the standard for fantasy in films. But the key difference is that Jackson had years to prepare to shoot those movies, and a lot less time to get ready for The Hobbit films. Jackson has openly said as much during behind-the-scenes features for the second trilogy. That may be why The Battle of Five Armies and its two predecessors don’t feel as fully realized as the previous trilogy.
Two films become three
Splitting The Hobbit into two movies was an understandable decision. The 1977 animated adaptation of The Hobbit struggled to tell the entire story in an abbreviated fashion. There’s a lot that happens in the book, and giving it two films seemed like the right way to go. One of the ways that Jackson and company slipped from the path was their decision to make two films into three movies.
Bilbo Baggins has a quote in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings in which he states that he feels “sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” That’s an apt comparison that fans have made for years about The Hobbit trilogy. Three films pushed it too far. And while there are a lot of exciting sequences in the last film, the middle chapter, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, suffered from the decision to make it a separate movie.
Taking down the dragon
The Battle of the Five Armies opens with one of the film’s most thrilling scenes, as the dragon known as Smaug attacks the people of Laketown and destroys their homes. Sherlock and Doctor Strange star Benedict Cumberbatch lent his voice to Smaug, and he gives the dragon a deliciously wicked persona. Smaug enjoys raining destruction down on these people, and he considers it his revenge for the dwarves stealing from his treasure.
Among the townspeople, Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) steps up to face the dragon. The scene is a little drawn out compared to the novel, but it’s still one of the highlights of the film.
The love story that didn’t shine
Tolkin didn’t have a lot of prominent roles for female characters in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Jackson compensated for that in the original trilogy by elevating the love story between Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Arwen (Liv Tyler). So Jackson and his team tried to recreate that dynamic in The Hobbit films with the dwarf Kíli (Aidan Turner) and a female elf named Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly).
While it was an admirable attempt, creating Tauriel for the film meant that she didn’t have a natural place in the narrative. All of her scenes were invented for the movie, and she doesn’t have enough screen time with Kíli to justify the idea that they had fallen in love despite barely knowing each other. Tauriel’s tears over their broken connection felt forced and false at the end of the movie, and the scene lacked the power or the impact it was meant to have.
The further adventures of Gandalf and friends
One of the ways that The Hobbit was stretched out to three films involved adding things that weren’t in the novel. Tolkien did create appendices which revealed where Gandalf disappeared to for portions of the story.
Jackson expanded that into a sort of Middle-earth Avengers as Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy), and Saruman (Christopher Lee) team up to rescue Gandalf from Sauron. But their confrontation is short, and it falls flat on the screen after building up to that moment. It simply lacks the epic scale of the conflict with Sauron from the previous trilogy.
The final battle delivers on its promise
In the novel, Tolkien largely sidelined Bilbo from the titular battle of the five armies and he didn’t seem to have much of a desire to flesh that out. Because film is a visual medium, Jackson and company wouldn’t have been able to get away with making a similar decision. And as seen in The Two Towers‘ battle for Helm’s Deep, they were already experienced with expanding minor sequences from the novels.
The final battle of this film still falls short of the highs of Return of the King, but it does capture an epic scale as the armies of humans, elves, and dwarves forget about their quarrel with each other long enough to face an overwhelming force of orcs. And unlike the original trilogy, a handful of major characters in this film don’t make it out of the battle with their lives.
One last goodbye
It’s unfortunate that The Battle of the Five Armies was so badly snubbed by the Oscars, because it absolutely deserved to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song. Billy Boyd, the actor who played Peregrin Took in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, wrote and performed The Last Goodbye, the song that plays over the end credits. It’s a truly beautiful tribute to both trilogies, and a fitting way to close out the franchise.
Except the franchise will never truly end, even though most of Tolkien’s original stories have already been adapted. Amazon’s Prime Video is exploring an earlier era of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, while Warner Bros. is planning new live-action movies including The Hunt for Gollem, with Andy Serkis directing and reprising his role as the title creature.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies may not be a masterpiece like the earlier LOTR films, but it’s still easily among the best fantasy movies ever made. And since both the theatrical and extended versions are readily available to stream on Max, it’s worth revisiting this holiday season.
Watch The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies on Max.