The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

[JAWS]

The bats did as much in the movie as they did in the book. Actually more if you count what Legolas did, which I liked. I think within what Jackson is doing they're thr 5th army.

Well PJ does not seem to mind "improving" other parts of the Tolkien's story... So why not the Bats... Personally I did not like the Legolas bat ride. Just more silly "Look what Legolas can do" when they could be spending more time with the actual story... Or making the Bats cooler

I thought the five Armies were

Dwarves, Humans, Elf's Orc's and Eagles... Bats I think are considered part of the Orc army as they are not thinking beasts like the other armies. Eagles fit more of the Army definition then the Bats do... Hell perhaps he does not count Bats or Eagles... Perhaps he was counting the Goblin's that showed up for 3 seconds...

But I think it's the Eagles without question.

What were the five in the book?

 

[JAWS]

Yeah it's the Eagles that are considered the 5th army... Not the Bats... Chalk one up for JAWS

From LOTR Wiki

"The Battle of Five Armies was a battle waged between the Goblins and the Wargs against Men of Dale, Elves, Dwarves, Eagles and a Shape-shifter on and near the Lonely Mountain."

 

[jye4ever]

I thought they were Orcs, Dwarves, Elves, Sony, North Korea.

 

[jye4ever]

Published December 21, 2014 by Andrew Todd
Welcome To Middle-Earth: THE HOBBIT’s Bizarre Relationship With New Zealand

How Peter Jackson’s prequel trilogy altered a nation’s culture, its economy, and even its legislation.


When you go to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in New Zealand, in addition to two and a half hours of CGI fight scenes, you get a five-minute short prior to the film. It’s an EPK-style fluff piece, centring on New Zealand’s role in the making of the original and prequel trilogies and featuring all the movies’ stars thanking New Zealand. Its closing title card reads “Thanks, New Zealand! (© 2014 Warner Brothers Entertainment, Inc.)”.
In a way, that short, and that title slate, is representative of the entire relationship New Zealand has with these films.


At this point, New Zealand is more or less synonymous with Middle-Earth. Wherever you go, the image of my country is of a magical land full of short, hairy people (which is only partially true). Whether being cheerfully called a “****ing hobbit” by my editor when visiting the United States, or repeatedly asked “magst du Herr der Ringe?” when visiting Germany, among the first things off people’s tongues upon learning I’m a New Zealander tends to be something to do with Tolkien.
This has been driven, of course, by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, a top-notch showcase of our filmmaking talent and our beautiful, cinematic landscapes.* It’s also been driven by the New Zealand government, marketing aggressively to eke every possible dollar out of those landscapes.** But few people outside New Zealand - and fewer than you’d expect inside it - truly realise the extent, weirdness, and mutually exploitative nature of the relationship Middle-Earth has with the Land of the Long White Cloud.


Kiwis have an odd relationship to their country’s artistic products that I’ve never quite been able to get behind. The attachment of New Zealanders to New Zealand artists goes beyond mere national pride, extending to the point of collective ownership of those artists by the population. The Flight of the Conchords is “our” TV show; Booker prizewinner The Luminaries is “our” novel; Lorde’s Grammys are “our” Grammys. So, too, are The Hobbit films “our” movies. Much like the subculture that has built up around loving New Zealand music simply for being from New Zealand, there’s a feeling of patriotic duty about The Hobbit. People who never go to the movies otherwise come out of the woodwork in droves for these movies. It’s an obligation.


In a country of four million people, where a not-insignificant portion of the population either directly worked on these films or knows someone who did, it’s easy to feel like they are ours. There’s a casual attainability to the film industry here, driven by its size relative to the population and its international visibility relative to the country as a whole, that makes everyone seem to think they’re a part of The Hobbit and that they share in its success. But The Hobbit is a Hollywood film, financed by Hollywood money and made to Hollywood’s demands, with any significant portion of the profits going back to Hollywood. It just happens to have been made in New Zealand, by a New Zealand director, with a New Zealand crew and a New Zealand cast (well...New Zealand extras).


I don’t know how widespread WB’s marketing for these films is elsewhere, but in New Zealand, it’s like the Eye of Sauron - lidless, wreathed in flame, and always watching. The country’s entire image has been transformed by these films. We’re marketed as “Home of Middle-Earth,” and when you visit New Zealand, you’re greeted by Tolkien imagery almost immediately. Wellington Airport, for example, famously sports a giant sculpture of Gollum in its main concourse. Even before you reach the airport, you’ll be bombarded with hobbitry. The largely government-owned airline Air New Zealand is well-known for its creative (and often irritating) inflight safety videos, but it has produced multiple videos based on Rings and The Hobbit (as well as painting their planes up with dragons and dwarves). Here’s the latest one, featuring Peter Jackson, Elijah Wood, Richard Taylor, Sylvester McCoy, Dean O’Gorman, and What We Do In The Shadows’ Taika Waititi:

These videos are designed to make air safety fun, but from me and many other locals, they elicit only groans. I’m sure for the people visiting New Zealand for Hobbitty tourism (and there are plenty of those***) get a kick out of them, but many native Kiwis hate their national airline’s saccharine pandering.
But that’s not the worst thing that the New Zealand government has done with regards to The Hobbit. Get ready for politics!


Back when The Hobbit was in pre-production, a series of actors’ union boycotts (which have their own internal politics that I won’t go into here) brought to light a lack of clarity in New Zealand employment law, particularly where it pertains to film productions. As it stood, the law was unclear whether workers on films were independent contractors or employees. Industry groups had lobbied for clarification, but it wasn’t until The Hobbitthat it happened. Practically speaking, most film workers have always been contractors, due to the short terms of most productions, but a number of the conditions for classification as a contractor didn’t really fit with the processes of film production. But independent contractors can’t collectively bargain for better conditions, so Kiwi and Australian actors’ unions tried to leverage the law’s grey areas to gain employee status on The Hobbit (and subsequent productions as well, I have to assume).


Warner Brothers panicked. The situation for them was legally and financially perilous, and the subsequent events happened so quickly that it wasn’t until the dust settled that the public really grasped what had occurred.


Warners threatened to take the production to Ireland. Film technicians protested the actors’ blacklist, fearful it would cause them to lose years’ worth of work. Peter Jackson lobbied the government, presumably fearful his filmmaking empire would suddenly lose its biggest contract. The actors lifted their boycott, but the government continued to claimit was still on as Prime Minister John Key met with Warner Brothers to discuss their concerns over the law. Then, in just a couple of weeks, the law of the land was changed to meet the demands of a large American film studio.


Now, the intentions of all involved (the government, Peter Jackson, the various unions, and WB) are somewhat opaque, in no small part due to everyone representing each other falsely to some degree at one point or another. But the end result is that New Zealand’s democratically-elected Prime Minister John Key had the law changed to fit Warners’ needs - behind closed doors, and without consultation to the public or to the wider industry. What’s more, the law was pushed through under a Parliamentary state of urgency enacted in response to a magnitude 7.1 earthquake that had hit the city of Christchurch (my city!) a month earlier. The whole situation, regardless of how much impact it had on the actual production process, is slathered in layers of dodginess.


In practice, again, the law change didn’t change much - most filmmakers worked as independent contractors before anyway - but by formalising it in this way, it sets in stone the inability of filmmakers to negotiate collectively. On multi-year productions like The Hobbit, which operate over longer terms than most contracts. that can be a big deal. And given that the same government has been systematically deconstructing workers’ rights in the years since, as well as snuggling up to big overseas business in other ways, to New Zealanders it certainly looks as though the government bent over backwards to accommodate Warner Brothers. Nobody really gets a major win out of this other than the studio.


All this is really symptomatic of a broader loss of innocence with which the New Zealand film industry has had to come to terms in recent years. We’re discovering our true place in the global film world: that of cheap hired guns for Hollywood. Where previously - as recently as a decade ago, even on the Rings films - we were self-starting mavericks, bringing our national “she’ll be right” attitude to all aspects of filmmaking, that independent spirit has been somewhat diminished of late. That our unions are so weak-to-nonexistent is a boon to foreign productions, which is (in addition to a large tax subsidy announced onstage by Key and James Cameron together) a large part of why the three Avatar sequels will be made here as well. The Hobbit was a huge employer, and many of those workers are moving straight onto Avatar, but these are not New Zealand films.


New Zealand does have its own film industry, obviously, and in 2014 it’s strong - films like Housebound, The Dead Lands, The Dark Horse, and What We Do In The Shadowshave been terrific, and in some cases even successful too. But these are low-to-mid-budget state- and self-funded films. The real money, real toys, and real international attention go towards big American studio blockbusters like The Hobbit, Avatar, Narnia, Tintin, or Planet of the Apes. We’ve come to quietly accept that we’re part of a business model now - an acceptance that is as sad in the big picture as it is lucrative in the small. When a studio film like The Hobbit is the most visible “New Zealand film” around, something’s wrong. New Zealand is an important part of the blockbuster post-production pipeline now, but thanks to our Prime Minister acting more like a CEO than a democratic leader, it’s one that’s willing to make significant concessions in order to get a gig. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement lurking around the corner (sporting a whole host of clauses that surrender our laws to American corporations), it’s an uncomfortable precedent to set.


So while New Zealand has certainly benefited from the production of the Hobbit films - and made itself more internationally visible in the process - it’s come at a cost. Do three more three-hour fantasy epics justify selling out our laws to Warner Brothers? Is it worth having a world-class film production centre in Wellington if all it does is contract gigs for Hollywood? Ultimately, history will be the judge - but I can’t see people looking back on The Hobbit as fondly as they will New Zealand sovereignty.


But hey - at least we have a statue of Gollum in the airport.


* Less so the Hobbit films, which lean much more heavily on CGI backdrops and green-screen stages than their predecessors. I probably saw more of actual New Zealand in the preshow KiwiRail commercial than in Peter Jackson’s cartoon.

** Before doing so in an even more exploitative fashion, through literally extracting minerals and oil from those landscapes.

*** I occasionally work as an improviser and corporate entertainer, and I’ve dressed up like a hobbit for tourist groups more times than I care to count.

 

[The Josh]

Yeah it's the Eagles that are considered the 5th army... Not the Bats... Chalk one up for JAWS

From LOTR Wiki

"The Battle of Five Armies was a battle waged between the Goblins and the Wargs against Men of Dale, Elves, Dwarves, Eagles and a Shape-shifter on and near the Lonely Mountain."

These are the ones counted as the armies officially.

Dwarves, Elves, and Men against Orcs and Wargs. The eagles and bats are just part of the event.

 

[JAWS]

These are the ones counted as the armies officially.

Dwarves, Elves, and Men against Orcs and Wargs. The eagles and bats are just part of the event.

Well After doing further reading (Before I knew you posted this Josh )... It seems Tolkien and Jackson don't know how to count as I have read the Wargs referred to as an army and the eagles referred to as an "Army of Eagles". Should have been the battle of the six armies... Wargs in the book seem to be more independent thinkers and not just mounts... Thus making them the fifth.

Either way... I see the Eagles as the Fifth army in the movie and not the bats... If they were... then "Worst.... Army.... EVER!"

 

[JAWS]

I am going again on Tuesday... My friend has not seen it yet and I go to all the middle earth films twice. Hope I like it a little more..

The Josh... How did you feel about the film?? I don't see you defending it as much as the last one... I am sure you still liked it... But were you a bit let down? Just wondering.

 

[The Josh]

The Josh... How did you feel about the film?? I don't see you defending it as much as the last one... I am sure you still liked it... But were you a bit let down? Just wondering.

I quite enjoyed it. It like the other two isn't perfect but I have enjoyed the ride. I find this a fitting set of films to go on the shelf with The Lord of the Rings. I actually just finished writing out my thoughts on the film.

As far as defending the films. I just realized I really can't care much about those that didn't like the films or have issues that I'm just scratching my head over. I'm enjoying them for me and me alone. I hope to share that with others but if not I can walk it alone.

 

[jye4ever]

I got your back Josh, all 3 are enjoyable and worth owning.

I actually like the villains in this.

I just wish something with more substance had broken Thorin out of his spell.

 

[azurepred]

I really liked this. It had more emotion than any of the other films including lotr. My only gripes were some of the wonky and pointless CGI imagery that has already been pointed out. I think the hobbit movies got better with each one. Don't care that this trilogy isn't quite as good as the lotr, not sure why it even matters....

 

[jye4ever]

I am unable to sit thru the PT.

I have no problem sitting thru these.

Yeah, a lot more cgi.

Whatever, it doesn't ruin them because the subject matter, Middle Earth, remains worth revisiting.

 

[The Josh]

I got your back Josh, all 3 are enjoyable and worth owning.

I actually like the villains in this.

I just wish something with more substance had broken Thorin out of his spell.

Thanks man

I really like them as well. Smaug is fantastic as was the Necromancer. I also really liked Azog and Bolg.

See I really love that with Thorin. I go into more detail in my review.

 

[DEADDACK_33]

Yeah, I loved all three Hobbit films as well. I had no problem with some of the changes and character additions PJ made. Almost seemed to me like a lot of people went to BotFA already having made up their minds they weren't going to like it.

 

[jye4ever]

Thanks man

I really like them as well. Smaug is fantastic as was the Necromancer. I also really liked Azog and Bolg.

See I really love that with Thorin. I go into more detail in my review.

Post that bad boy.

 

[The Ween]

I think if some of you would watch the film in regular 2D, the CGI wouldn't bother you as much. I always see it in 3D HFR, then again in 2D with my mother.

 

[The Josh]

Post that bad boy.

I'll have it up soon. Wanting someone to double check some stuff before its posted on the FP of TORn.

 

[The Ween]

 

[jye4ever]

I think if some of you would watch the film in regular 2D, the CGI wouldn't bother you as much. I always see it in 3D HFR, then again in 2D with my mother.

That definatey helps.

 

[JAWS]

I quite enjoyed it. It like the other two isn't perfect but I have enjoyed the ride. I find this a fitting set of films to go on the shelf with The Lord of the Rings. I actually just finished writing out my thoughts on the film.

As far as defending the films. I just realized I really can't care much about those that didn't like the films or have issues that I'm just scratching my head over. I'm enjoying them for me and me alone. I hope to share that with others but if not I can walk it alone.

Well that hurts...

Well I know I have come down hard on the last two.. But it I should state that I still find them enjoyable (DOS EE not TC )... Just not as good as I was hoping... I still stand by my criticisms and feel this would have been a better two part movie but I will have no problem enjoying them for what they are down the road.

I got your back Josh, all 3 are enjoyable and worth owning.

I actually like the villains in this.

I just wish something with more substance had broken Thorin out of his spell.

I love the villains in these films and I am sure I will enjoy the EE even more...

Funny thing is.. Other then ROTK... I have enjoyed all of these films more on Home video then in the theaters... Perhaps there is just so much to look at I don't feel I can see it all on a big screen but I can enjoy the "look" of the films on Blu ray....

PS - Does your opinion count Jye?? Because you like EVERYTHING. I point to Transformers 4 as Example A.

I am unable to sit thru the PT.

I have no problem sitting thru these.

Yeah, a lot more cgi.

Whatever, it doesn't ruin them because the subject matter, Middle Earth, remains worth revisiting.

PT = Unwatchable.... Can't watch them and I choose to ignore them... Though I find parts of PM enjoyable... Other then Jar Jar PM is the only one that feels like a SW movie to me... Probably because it had the least amount of Green Screen.

 

[JAWS]

By the way I never mentioned my fav moment in all the Middle Earth films..

Cave troll Battering Ram... Laughed really hard at the end result.