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.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

There are clear points of dissimilarity between The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, largely in how each film tells its portion of the story. Fellowship is hurried and clipped in its telling whereas Two Towers is much more gradual, slowly layering in tension and torrential threat before arriving at a crescendo. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King does not attempt to continue this trend with a brand new phase of storytelling though, what it does instead is marry the disparate voices of its predecessors, arriving at a wavelength that may struggle to be considered in the singular - this is very much a continuation of already extant episodes rather than a piece unto itself - but works wonderfully as a grand summation of this Middle Earth material. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Return of the King is best enjoyed hot on the heels of its prequels; the third-act in a unbroken chain rather than a second sequel. 

As if to underline this marriage of differing narrative objectives - Fellowship had to catch viewers up on thousands of years of imagined history while Two Towers simply has to set up an almighty battle - characters within Return of the King find their finer qualities reconciled before the curtain finally falls. This mediation is best expressed by this third film's approach to Gandalf. In the first instalment this grey wizard was a leaf-smoking, wrinkled adventurer; in the second, a bright angelic presence who foretold the salvation of morning and burned the eyes out of any who gazed upon him. Thankfully, Return of the King allows a little of the first episode's distracted crankiness to creep back into Ian McKellen's performance. Between battles he even gets to fire up his pipe. He's back to being a person who needs to sort through his thoughts then. At the other end of this world, Elijah Wood's Frodo, Sean Astin's Sam, and Andy Serkis' Gollum creep through a boiling, computer-generated inferno towards the summit of their quest. Perhaps it's just that volcanic regions read so well on film but, like Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith a couple of years later, there's a sense in Return of the King that the armies of special effects teams that toil on these films are delivering several steaming levels above their previous, still extremely impressive, work.

On release, Return of the King was mocked for the inelegance of its endings - staggered sequences in which it felt like a clean break was being proposed but then instantly succeeded by yet another just-as-conclusive incident. Although the "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Tolkien's book has been omitted here (of all the interquel ideas that have been floated as a way of the following up the enormous success of this series, it's a wonder that a filmic adaptation of this discarded element apparently hasn't ever been considered), writer-director Peter Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens find a wonderfully elegant way to contrast the enormous accomplishment of the Hobbits with the aggressive indifference of the people who have stayed at home, living lives completely removed from the war with Sauron. Young men wreathed in the livery of mighty human kingdoms? These parochial little gnomes are far more impressed by a truly massive pumpkin. As well, given the pervasive warmongering of the period in which this film series was completed and released, it feels not just notable but forward-thinking that Return of the King leaves us with the impression that combat takes more than a physical toll on its victims. It leaves invisible scars on all those that survive, preventing them from reassuming the patterns and rhythms of their previous lives. In this telling, Frodo is broken by his desire for the ring; reduced to a bleeding mess squabbling with another junkie above a crack in hell. There's just no undoing that. Even the overabundance of slow-motion photography in these epilogues, that seize on flickering facial gesture, is appropriate. It is as if the filmmakers themselves cannot bear to let these characters go. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Although The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers picks up exactly where The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring left off, the two films have surprisingly distinct visual identities. Fellowship, with its hobbit holes and winding, Escher staircases could - when not hurrying away from such images - present moods premised on these fantastical, often hand-crafted environments. Viewers were able to sink into the crevices. The Two Towers, by comparison, is a much more expansive, horizontal experience; a film about great, galloping journeys and never-ending plains that builds to the siege of an enormous hold chiseled into a mountain. Whereas before characters looked like tourists miserably coping with a destination holiday at the ends of the earth, here the warrior heroes find themselves hurrying between homesteads while the countryside around them boils with brewing conflict. The Two Towers then owing far more than expected to the widescreen vistas of American westerns or the arrow-flecked turbulence of Japanese chanbara. 

Perhaps because we're already well aware of their overarching objectives, the surviving members of The Company of the Ring recede into the background for significant stretches of The Two Towers. Writer-director Peter Jackson - Stephen Sinclair, who previously collaborated with Jackson on Meet the Feebles and Braindead, joining Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens as co-writers - apportions space to two characters who chart paths into and out of damnation: Andy Serkis' motion-captured Gollum and the late Bernard Hill as the enfeebled King Théoden. Gollum, who acts as a guide into hell for Elijah Wood's Frodo and Sean Astin's Sam, struggles with distinct and even warring personalities, each with markedly different outlooks. A rapid-fire back-and-forth between the piteous Sméagol and the more conniving, ring hungry Gollum, as the two aspects weigh up their options, is both impressive and humorous. But, equally, watching this computer-generated body splash along a shallow river after a slippery fish is actually able to evoke a vivid physical trepidation. We are acutely aware that the sallow, vulnerable skin of this creature is dangerously close to some sharp-looking rocks. That injury doesn't occur (or, more accurately, couldn't occur) isn't the point. The shots, despite their falsehood, prickle shivering sense memory in their audience. 

Hill's Théoden awakens out of a crumbling, mummified half-life (shades of The Fisher King from Arthurian legend or King Arthur himself, as depicted in the latter half of John Boorman's Excalibur) and is instantly thrown into the tragedy of having lost his child. Hill's performance isn't showy, he doesn't rage or even really demand attention in successive scenes where his character must make the most of a truly dire lot. What the actor offers instead is a quiet, resurgent dignity steeped in age and doubt. Viggo Mortensen's otherworldly Aragorn may be pegged for greatness but it is Hill's Théoden who, despite the enormous responsibility this older man has woken up into, is able to consistently transmit a seasoned, kingly temperament. Which is to say that as the situation worsens, as greater armies of mutant Orcs bear down on this harried community, Hill's Théoden isn't seen to buckle. Instead he seems to grow bigger and bigger in his role as a front-line commander, defying the patriarchal standards of his time to place faith in his niece, Miranda Otto's Éowyn, and fighting side-by-side with his knights - knowing that are all likely doomed - as they blockade creaking fortifications. This rain-lashed Battle of Helm's Deep still staggers, thanks largely to the sheer amount of onscreen bodies, both living and computer-generated, who crash upon this fortress. Director Jackson demonstrating an ability to build entire acts out of concluding action that account for scope, subtlety, and character. A shot that simulates a camera arm, fixed to a vehicle, rolling as it follows behind mounted riders as they batter through waves of armoured ogres has a genuine note of delirium about it. 

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Revisited in its theatrical cut, director Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is still an impressive achievement in compressed storytelling, an approach that makes the film's three hour runtime feel positively breakneck. In adapting JRR Tolkien's first volume of The Lord of the Rings Jackson, along with co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have jettisoned characters and situations, as well as borrowed events from later books, to arrive at a piece that is largely built around two characters - Elijah Wood's Frodo and Viggo Mortensen's Aragorn - both of whom are slowly being crushed by expectation. For Frodo it's a pressure that he has, to some degree, chosen to take on himself. Although, as Ian McKellen's Gandalf pontificates, Frodo is uniquely suited to meet this call to adventure, it is this young hobbit who stands amongst squabbling giants at Rivendell and volunteers himself to transport a ring of incredible, corrupting power across the world to be dropped into a volcano. 

Frodo, and the rest of the halfling members of this expedition for that matter, are positioned as cheery innocents who, in attempting to repeat the storied quests of their forebears, find themselves journeying deeper and deeper into an all-encompassing horror. It isn't difficult then to draw parallels between the residents of the green and pleasant Hobbiton and the British Tommies who left their homes to be gobbled up by a new kind of warfare on French fields during the Great War. Both are, popularly, framed as guileless and therefore massively unprepared for what awaits them abroad. Tolkien, presumably, twisting his own flea-bitten experience of pulverising modernity at the Somme to ask what conflict could possibly be worth all this bloodshed and destruction? Threat in this first installment then is organised in terms of the technological, specifically generated by a vassal state transforming itself into an industrial hub. Christopher Lee's fallen wizard Saruman, who believes it politically expedient to align himself with a returning spectre, orders his underlings to overturn ancient trees and churn up the earth beneath them until this sorcerer's  domain is cast in mud and smoke; an enormous warren of intersecting tunnels where roughly hewn armour and mutant hordes each tumble off a production line. 

In a wider realm spotted with the crumbled remains of advanced civilisations, Saruman's excavation registers as obscene - the willful destruction of a formerly picturesque, fantasy landscape for selfish or even cowardly ends. This is war as a seismic disturbance. A blot that threatens to, should the ghostly Sauron regain his full strength, engulf everything. Whereas Frodo's suitability to smuggle this crucial ring is largely illustrated through comparison - several much more obviously powerful men shudder to even touch the thing - rather than stated exposition, Aragorn's royal lineage, and the weight that carries, is directly spoken to us on several occasions. Perhaps, given his cool nickname and proficiency in a fight, the screenwriters worried that an audience unfamiliar with the original text (or overfamiliar with the Neanderthal seen in Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings) might assume that the character is a heavy and nothing more? Certainly Mortensen's performance consistently works against any such dismissal, tempering whirlwind sword skills with a tender, fatherly nature that suggests a greatness on the cusp of being assumed. This insistence that we know Aragorn is descended from fickle human kings introduces a note of doubt about his motives as well. Will he be able to overcome the innate, reflexive treachery of man and be a true ally to Frodo? 

More than anything though, what remains specifically appealing about Jackson's approach to Fellowship is that this piece arrived before green screen and computer generated effects became a ubiquitous answer to filmmaking problems. Jackson, who made his bones on low budget horror (if not splatter) films threads this first instalment with similarly inventive compositional solutions. Since this is a world that demands people and objects of varying sizes are interacting with each other, there is a constant need to find fresh viewpoints as a way of concealing the scaffolding beneath them. So although CG is frequently deployed it sits alongside detailed and expansive sets, life-sized puppetry, forced perspectives, and (reportedly maximal) miniature environments. Regardless of whether or not it should be the case, these physical - touchable - effects are better suited to stressing an idea of human craftsmanship and ingenuity than purely digital compositions. If big budget blockbuster entertainment is a series of magic tricks deployed in service to a hair-raising story, then a variety and depth in the execution of these deceptions is best suited to the task of consistently delighting an audience. None of this is to say that Fellowship is perfect - at least in this edit the truncated shape of the central journey, one told primarily in gigantic establishing shots, begins to feel less like a grueling odyssey and more like a succession of bullet points, as if favoured locales are being ticked off - but Jackson's opening salvo cannot help but register as a laudable example of large-scale filmmaking that foregrounds the kaleidoscopic disciplines that underpin such massive endeavours.