Fans of the first two Hobbit movies may not be disappointed by this final instalment, which offers few departures from the formula of yore, but those who remember the risks Jackson took with Bad Taste, Braindead, Heavenly Creatures and even his King Kong reboot may find themselves wishing for more than just more of the same.
#Finale 2014 review movie
Yet like the haunted Thorin Oakenshield (a Shakespearean Richard Armitage), who spends much of this final movie holed up beneath the Lonely Mountain, bedazzled by an undulating sea of gold, one wonders whether the purity of Jackson’s original quest hasn’t been lost amid the series’ shiny success. Originally slated for direction as a two-parter by Pan’s Labyrinth maestro Guillermo del Toro, the series returned to Jackson’s helmsmanship following lengthy production delays, and promptly expanded into a trilogy via the addition of extraneous appendices and gender-balancing new characters (viz Evangeline Lilly’s Tauriel). Like the Star Wars prequels, the Hobbit movies were always destined to disappoint. Having never cared for the source novels, I found myself wholly transported to Middle-earth, swept away by the sheer cinematic force of Jackson’s vision. Animators like Ralph Bakshi had taken a crack at Tolkien’s weighty tomes before, but Jackson was making game-changing use of computer graphics to blur the line between the “real” and the “imagined”. Back then, the scope and scale of Peter Jackson’s visual imagination was breathtaking. A nd so, in the end, we find ourselves once again at the beginning, having travelled there and back again in the company of elves, dwarves, dragons and hobbits – a journey which started 13 years (and more than 17 screen-hours) ago with the unveiling of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in December 2001.