The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies - Extended Edition

The big draw here, with this Extended Edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, is that whatever clips have been added for this bells-and-whistles retail version has caused this concluding chapter to jump up an entire rating. So a 12 certificate cinema release is transformed, through these additions, into a 15 (or a PG-13 has now been elevated into an R, if you prefer). Obviously, given director Peter Jackson's priors with extremely entertaining splatter comedies like Braindead, there's the presumption (or, perhaps more accurately, desire) that these brand new moments will revolve around the violent detonation of computer-generated bodies. Following a viewing though, and whilst browsing a list of the Extended Edition's newly restored footage to be certain, it's actually quite shocking to discover how much of this film's more exciting dramatic material was chipped away for the cut that saw the wider, big screen release. 

A brief exchange between Martin Freeman's Bilbo and James Nesbitt's dwarf Bofur, as the former attempts to quietly sneak out of a crack in a besieged mountain filled with treasures, is an early highlight. The sequence standing out not just because it is an actual conversation in a film trilogy packed with declarative exposition but because Bofur is well aware that Bilbo is, effectively, deserting and the dwarf wishes to give his blessing without outright saying so. It's a back-and-forth in which both participants are lying in word but each actor's performance, and the carefully selected phrasing of the screenwriters (Jackson credited alongside Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro) indicates an unspoken agreement based on a genuine friendship. Although no great shakes in most filmic contexts, this discussion is positively revelatory for a prequel series so completely dedicated to surface-level chatter that imparts nothing but momentum. As with Bilbo's battle with the Mirkwood spider nest in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the scene is greedily received by anyone holding the belief that, had he been allowed to, Freeman could have comfortably carried these films on his shoulders. 

Further seemingly minor insertions serve the central conceit of greed clouding the minds of otherwise noble men, adding flavour and tonal variation to a film in desperate need of something other than monotonous action and fey love triangles. Notably, the dwarven and elven armies that gather to plunder the dragon's trove actually clash in this telling, ratcheting up the tension for a forthcoming confrontation with massing goblin hordes, by pointlessly spilling each other's blood and thereby depleting any eventual alliance. Described as dragon sickness within the piece, this version allows this all-consuming avarice to visibly take hold in many formerly sympathetic characters, confirming prejudices and setting the allied armies of antiquity against each other. All of which results in a particularly needless, but nevertheless entertaining pre-main event slaughter. Speaking of which, the prolonged battles that account for the majority of Five Armies' runtime also reveal the reason for this film's harsher home video certificate. As hoped for, we are treated to many fresh instances in which Wētā's textured marionettes are absolutely pulverised. Again, these additions introduce much needed variety into the bloodless back-and-forth between enormous, computer-generated legions seen in the theatrical cut. 

A sequence in which Bilbo's dwarven friends commandeer a war chariot, complete with whirring Ben-Hur teeth that shear legs from beneath armoured orcs and turn the heads of misshapen trolls into black, blubbery messes, is a significantly better version of the roller coaster-style action attempted in previous Hobbits. Here, there's a sense of danger and exhilaration rather than aggravation and outright boredom. As well, the decision for the camera to dwell on mutilated orc bodies as they attempt to stand on their bleeding stumps may be grimly humorous but it is also suggestive of the pitilessness associated with industrialised warfare, in which the flesh and blood individual is exposed to all manner of terrifying mechanical horrors. This idea of indiscriminate torment was also present in the theatrical cut's firebombing of Laketown by Benedict Cumberbatch's gloating Smaug - the film's opening passage in which a thriving and comparatively advanced (when judged against the medieval ruins elsewhere) settlement is gobbled up by a swirling orange flame that descends out of the sky - but, in this longer cut, Jackson is able to reiterate the point. Basically, all the extra notes of savagery reinserted for this release lift Battle of the Five Armies out of a routine rehash of Middle Earth's greatest hits. By applying more vivid, physical accounts of pain, combat shock and human bewilderment to this material, Jackson has rather more successfully appended this misfiring serial to his own, Great War conscious take on The Lord of the Rings.  

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug - Extended Edition

Three hours and six minutes long, when viewed in this expanded edit, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is, given the length, very obviously not an honest-to-goodness attempt to simply adapt the middle section of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Instead the film is more of an expensive retrofit that presumes to batter this material into a shape that better connects with writer-director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In expanding Tolkien's text Jackson and his co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro have transformed a comparatively slight children's book into hours upon hours of impersonal incident. Packed with interchangeable dwarves and possessed of a digressive structure Desolation of Smaug meanders, a piece that consistently finds itself in desperate need of a unifying perspective on the constant, plastic noise. 

That isn't to say that there aren't stretches of the film that entertain though. Desolation of Smaug absolutely explodes into life about 40 minutes in when the camera settles on Martin Freeman's pleasantly understated Bilbo Baggins for some prolonged capering. Trapped in a murky forest and surrounded by pungent swamps and creeping spiders, the young halfling takes the initiative, briefly behaving as if this were actually his story. He climbs knotted branches to get a gasp of fresh air, as well as a sense of where exactly they need to go next, then battles with various layers of screeching arachnids. An albino creature that lives beneath a trap door and aims clawed appendage at a temporarily dropped One Ring even looks like something out of Jackson's previous epic, King Kong. A welcome sort of oozing nightmare then. Sir Ian McKellen's Gandalf the Grey, who is now on an entirely separate adventure, also gets to explore a variety of expertly ruined environments - from a disturbed tomb that was carved into a mountainside thousands of years ago to a castle packed with staircases that lead off in every conceivable direction. 

Perhaps it's because both sequences are built around singular characters with clear moment-to-moment objectives rather than an undulating mob on a mystic (and therefore disinteresting) quest? It helps as well that Jackson is well versed in the language of horror filmmaking. Pitch black shadows and canted angles on vulnerable human progress through oppressively baroque environments are much more in the director's wheelhouse, especially when compared to a grossly distended roller coaster sequence in which a dozen casked dwarves thrash along river rapids. It's an interlude that registers as elastic and artificial, no matter how much incongruent, pixelated GoPro footage Jackson squeezes in amongst the cartoon rollicking. Issued at the tail end of the post-Avatar craze for 3D filmmaking, Desolation of Smaug is similarly dependent on green screen sets and the hapless actors they ensnare but not so fluent in how it resolves the relationship between these individual elements. Frequently there's a sense that the film's weightless action would be better served by a total submission to animation. If, for instance, Desolation of Smaug was stylised and cel animated then the obvious artifice of bodies completely unencumbered by physics might then read as charming or, at least, gesturally pleasant. Here they are instead a persistent and hammering reminder that you're watching a confused retread of grander films.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Although this is Sam Raimi's first pass at a Disney era Marvel character, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is the director's fourth adaptation of works that can be traced back to writer-illustrator Steve Ditko. As such, it's tempting to examine Multiverse within the context of Raimi's own web crawler trilogy. How then does this Doctor Strange episode measure up to the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man films? While there's less - but not zero - willingness to physically and mentally torture the film's leading man, Multiverse does improve on these previous works in one single instance: it combines the role of the leading lady and the villain into one super-character, subject to the extended attention you'd expect to be apportioned to the former while also acting with the ruthless determination of the latter. 

The first Raimi Spider-Man seemed to be positioning Kirsten Dunst's Mary Jane as a co-lead for that franchise, subordinate to Peter Parker's overarching journey but still able to eke out her own little corners of agony. That film's sequels were less inclined to follow that blueprint, discarding her perspective almost entirely in the theatrical version of Spider-Man 2 (an extended home video cut gives her a few underwritten asides) then transforming her into a prize to be haggled over in Spider-Man 3. A pivotal scene in the first Spider-Man has Parker inadvertently hear a screaming match between Mary Jane and her ranting father. He observes something private and embarrassing but doesn't then attempt to use this information against Mary Jane. Instead he commiserates, clumsily, before Mary Jane whisks herself away, smiling through tears.

Although designed - in the screenwriting sense - to allow the audience to see a gentle, non-judgmental side of Parker, how Dunst plays the scene keys us into the idea that Mary Jane has her own separate narrative arc, one distinct from, but complimentary to, Spider-Man's. Both characters are working class children trying to disconnect from their impoverished home environments to make something less mundane out of themselves. They both dream of a broad kind of adulation; a stardom that asks for little of themselves in return. Michael Waldron (the writer of Disney streaming series Loki and the "The Old Man and the Seat" episode of Rick and Morty)'s Multiverse screenplay does something similar with its two older leads. Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange and Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch are both creeping deeper into middle-age bereft of personal connection. Strange devoted his life to the pursuit of magic, missing out on a relationship with Rachel McAdams' Christine Palmer, while Wanda suffered through a pastiche of American sitcoms that gifted a phantom family, then zapped them away from her. 

Disney streaming series WandaVision give us a bereaved sorceress who kidnapped an entire town before using them as tranquilised puppets as a way to work through the trauma she had experienced battling the world conqueror Thanos. The show, a superhero-flavoured update on The Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life", toyed with genuine disquiet before, ultimately, resisting the urge to paint Wanda as an out-and-out monster. This aversion ended up undermining the strangeness of the piece, an effect exacerbated by a series finale that attempted to drum up enthusiasm for a television budgeted beam war. Multiverse demonstrates far less restraint, Scarlet Witch slaughters dozens of mystical innocents and superhero stand-ins. The film even going as far as summoning up a team of vaguely fascist Avengers from an alternative reality for Wanda to (literally) pull limb from limb. Raimi consistently asserts himself in this cheery cruelty, working against Disney's well-established formula - one that demands an irreverent stance on permanence - by burning tossed-off redshirt characters into the audience's memory. This effect achieved by giving these no-hopers deaths so alarming that their passing lingers arounds the film's edges like radioactive fallout.