So began a battle that none had expected; and it was called The Battle of the Five Armies, and it was very terrible. -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
The very terrible battle takes up only one chapter in Tolkien s novel and is the majority of the action in Peter Jackson s final entry in The Hobbit trilogy. It s a stunner of a sequence, although it also illuminates the flawed logic of stretching out Tolkien s book into three installments. What is the real story? How do we get from A to B? And, crucially, why do we care?
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And where is Bilbo Baggins in all of it? The novel is concise, humorous, with a dark periphery, and even in the midst of extremely tense moments, we have Bilbo, a tut-tutting little homebody, wondering how the heck he got involved in all of this nonsense in the first place. There s not enough Bilbo in The Battle of the Five Armies. The story misses his presence. The film s first mildly humorous moment, a line reading from Martin Freeman, comes