Well, if you’re going to go big, you better go really big! Or, at least that seems to be director Peter Jackson‘s thinking when it comes to the third and final installment in his Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies as he reveals the climactic battle promised in the title will run for 45 minutes in the new film. Now that’s a lot of fighting.
“There’s a lot of logistics that have to be thought through,” Jackson tells Entertainment Weekly. “We have dwarves and men and elves and orcs, all with different cultures, with different weapons, and different shields and patterns and tactics.”
The battle will take place at the foot of the Lonely Mountain and when it comes to the logistics Jackson mentioned he adds, “Before we could loose the first arrow, we had to design the landscape itself and figure out, ‘Okay, if we have 10,000 orcs, how much room are they going to take up? Are they going to fill up the valley or look like a speck?’ Then we could start drawing the arrows on the schematics.” Click the picture to the right for a larger look.
And, yes, the schematic includes the eagles and yes, Jackson acknowledges what all of us have said before, which is to wonder why don’t the eagles simply take the fellowship wherever they need to go. “Tolkien uses eagles in a way that can be kind of awkward because they tend to show up out of the blue and change things pretty quickly,” says Jackson. “So here they’re just part of the plan, not the saviors. I mean, I do realize that if the eagles had just been able to bring Frodo to Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings and let him drop the ring in, those movies would have been much shorter.”
I can respect the fact Jackson acknowledges that issue, but personally I find it to be such a major issue in the storytelling, which is so focused on the journey the word was actually used in the first Hobbit film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, that it should be more than just an “I realize” scenario. If you realize, fix it.
As for the possibility of just CG characters fighting CG characters in the end, Jackson and his team set restrictions, “We have a rule that we’re not allowed to go more than two or three shots of anonymous people fighting without cutting back to our principal characters. Otherwise the audience just ends up with battle fatigue.”
I would really love to be able to enjoy this movie seeing how the first two bored me stiff. So here’s to hoping everything comes together at gives us something truly satisfying to discuss when it comes to this trilogy.
All that said, here’s the final poster for the movie.
