By "let's", I basically mean "I". GEEK RANT! Aaaaaaaand.... go.
I'm a big Tolkien fan. Have read most of his texts, re-read them, and scour blogs about philology and mythology in relation to anything I need clarified from his writing. But I'm certainly no purist when it comes to creative deviation in switching from medium to medium. The Lord of the Rings movies are incredibly successful in condensing and making accessible an otherwise cumbersome text. In contrast, the script for The Hobbit, in order to be successfully translated into a piece of entertainment that allows moments to breathe and characters to flourish, requires a tremendous amount of shoring up from the sparse text which on its own implies an awful lot but mostly talks around it all.
So, gone are the beautiful monologues and flowery language of Tolkien's own hand, sadly replaced with generic action-film trope-y dialogue. Making this somewhat more bearable are some fairly startling new insights into characters, though, which have been a pleasant surprise. A fully realized Thorin in the films reinforces the themes of the novel which don't really become apparent until the last chapters, and it almost gives the impression that Tolkien himself didn't really have much direction in mind when originally writing it. A bunch of fluffy adventures without much consequence followed by an indictment of greedy and covetous decisions? Well that was unexpected at best.
So now that we're operating on a level where characters have the chance to confront their weaknesses and either overcome them or be consumed by them, it's much easier to expect that the closing film in a series of 3 is going to be where a substantial amount of conflict resolution occurs. The titular Hobbit will have stepped outside of his comfort zone and have changed irrevocably, and Thorin will break down and succumb to an inescapable fate. The path to which, it should be mentioned, has been in no small part engineered by Gandalf (for purposes of world-building and connectivity, as told in Tolkien's ret-con). So the stakes of what's really happening are more elusive than in the original telling of the story.
Tolkien's dissatisfaction with the splitting up of his ginormous Lord of the Rings volume is no secret, and even when he agreed to it, his title for the third volume was still overturned by his publishers. So right away the splitting of the Hobbit into three distinct story movements is a bit tricky as to where to determine logical breaking points - A great irony that the second Hobbit film ends with a very cliffhanger-y moment, quite the way The Two Towers as a book did - a story element which was drastically re-structured for the film version. So in subtitling each part of the story, the decisions to go with "Unexpected Journey" pays a nice tribute to the opening chapter's title, and indicates that it's the beginning of a great adventure. "Desolation Of Smaug", though only mentioned once in the text, appears on Thorin's map and also nicely sums up the the second film's responsibility to not only expand the story geographically and continue introducing new characters, but also drive up the stakes dramatically. Would it not make sense for the third film's subtitle to reference the fact that a proper resolution is on its way, without giving anything specifically away about the plot and/or characters? Apparently "There And Back Again", which to me accomplishes everything it needs to and still has roots in Tolkien's pen, seemed wrong. And so "The Battle of Five Armies" it's become.
WHAT? It's almost akin to hypothetically having re-titled "The Return of The King" to "The Battle of Pelennor Fields". A climactic and important event, to be sure, but a single event which doesn't particularly define the shape of the narrative. Even though I've heard it argued that Tolkien's choice over ROTK would have been "The War Of The Ring", and hence "Battle of Five Armies" is somehow similarly appropriate, I disagree. The stakes of LOTR are clearly defined in the opening chapters of "Fellowship Of The Ring". By the time the entire narrative of the story rolls around, the cataclysmic events that take place during said war are referenced without being directly spoiled, and the major turning points of the character arcs are all addressed within it. The actual Battle of Five Armies on its own does nothing for Bilbo's arc, nor does it really inform us about anything that will lead to seeing Thorin differently as a character. I've read of a joke title being bandied about:"Raiders Of The Lost Ark-enstone", which, number one, is laugh-out-loud clever, but also sadly a MUCH more appropriate title (if a tad unrealistic and goofy). The obsession with the jewel itself sets in motion so many important plot elements necessary to complete the story, at least as an allegory for greed and selfishness leading to war and desolation. Why abandon that in order to divert attention to something suggesting more CG action overkill? The final chapter ought to reassure us that closure is imminent. While in the end, as long as the film itself focuses on the emotional impact of what happens after the Dwarves arrive back to their home (as it seems to have been striving to set up thus far), the title might not matter so much. But this is still a disappointment. And a last-minute decision like this also kills years of brand recognition built up among the fan-base. if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
What are your thoughts? Over-reaction by a zealous fanboy nobody? Unwarranted artistic intrusion? WTF is a Hobbit?
I'll leave you to ponder this with a meme that never seemed to arrive on the interwebs on its own. Of course, maybe I'm just a decade behind the times.