There, Back Again:THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM

Turns out Peter Jackson remains a reliable guide to Middle Earth. Ten years after his last Hobbit movie, he’s now produced The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated movie that takes its narrative from a couple pages in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices and somehow spins satisfying feature-length story out of it. The two listless seasons of Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which are undeniably expensively made and appealing on that surface level, but are largely dramatically inert, had me doubting that the voluminous prequel lore of this fantasy world was worth mining for more filmmaking. But Jackson isn’t involved in those, and Rohirrim takes full advantage of what he can bring. Here are the Howard Shore themes, as well as the look and pace of his take on Middle Earth, as well as a knowing love of the source material that sets off the right mythopoeic resonances which make it feel suitably epic and involving. This is both familiar and fresh, by dint of giving anime director Kenji Kamiyama the reins. Once I adjusted to the look of Japanese animation, which is here more restrained and subtle in its embellishments than one might expect, I found it plays mostly like Jackson’s Tolkien. That’s doubly nostalgic for both the prose and world building of Tolkien's books and the now-classic flavor of Jackson's original trilogy. The result also has the deep pleasure of seeing hand-drawn animation on the big screen, an all-too-rare sight and one that feels more beautifully classical and hand-crafted. What an unexpectedly good match.

Set well before the narrative of the earlier movies, this story, adapted by Jackson’s co-writer Philippa Boyens and others, finds the Riders of Rohan fending off an invasion. You might remember them from the siege of Helm’s Deep—the spectacular action climax of The Two Towers. This is a couple hundred years before that. The King of Rohan (Brian Cox), the awesomely named Helm Hammerhand, turns down a marriage proposal on behalf of his daughter (Gaia Wise). She’s a classically heroic princess who knows how to ride a horse and use a sword, which will come in handy as war approaches and she’ll be key to their people’s defenses. She’s painted as a cool archetype, which helps fill in the details of her personalty. (She’s also designed like a blend between a Miyazaki tomboy, a red-haired Celtic queen, and an hourglass-shaped anime pinup.) The man her father rejects (Luke Pasqualino) decides he’d rather have the throne than her hand, so he gathers an army and the story proceeds through their clashes. The battles that follow are also a little Kurosawa in their scared villagers and amassing armies. There are also warrior princes and wise elders and magic creatures, and it builds to well-drawn combat and nicely rendered catharsis. This gives it the feeling of an old legend recalled to life. (Even the requisite small number of clumsy fan-friendly references aren't that bad.) It’s all suitably fantastical and epic and makes for a satisfying excuse to return to this world.

Play it Again:THE BEATLES: GET BACK andTHE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Tasked with shaping a film out of dozens upon dozens of hours of rehearsal footage, Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back is a long, shapeless thing running nearly eight hours over three parts. (The shortest episode is just over two hours; the longest is nearly three.) But the picture isn’t aimless. Taken exclusively from contemporaneous documentary footage chronicling the month of practice, writing, and recording that resulted in The Beatles’ final album, Jackson’s project of duration has an aim of scraping away the myth and rumor that has accumulated around this final period in the band’s life. This footage has remained largely unseen, despite being the foundation for director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 80-minute doc Let it Be, which has been available only as a bootleg for over four decades now. That film has lots of interesting moments, but is clearly a cramped, cut-down look at this moment—iconic melodies interspersed with fleeting glimpses at tensions between Paul, John, George, and Ringo. Jackson’s inclination toward creating spaces (and runtimes) you can wander around and get lost in—a boon to us admirers of his increasingly lengthy Middle-Earth fantasy sojourns—thus acts as an exhumation and expansion of that older film. In the process, through well-judged editing and a generous willingness to let scenes go on and on, it’s as close as a fly-on-the-wall to genius as we can get. There’s a magical moment late in the first episode where Paul is noodling on a guitar, working over a sliver of an idea with a chord, a bit of rhythm, a half-lyric. George joins in with strumming. Ringo adds some vocalizations, a bit of percussion. Then, all of a sudden, there it is. “Get Back.” One of the most iconic rock songs of all time just…appears. The film is full of moments like this as we see a variety of characters—wives, girlfriends, assistants, technicians, celebrity visitors, and so on—mill about and the band expands and contracts as petty disputes and deep tensions are nonetheless able to be resolved in real love and camaraderie. If there’s a sense that this is a band nearing the end, a jostling of artists and personalities not long for this world, there’s also an exhilaration in seeing the work before our eyes. Jackson, who has sand-blasted the archival grain to give it an unreal immediacy, lets us draw our own conclusions for the most part, correcting the record by restoring the humanity to these totemic figures of rock and roll history. Here they are as people, with silly asides, genuine fears, funny running jokes, honest reflections, exciting ideas, productive collaboration, sly banter, and, of course, brilliant talent. It’s a pleasure to spend time in this room—closed off in this rehearsal space and recording booth for hours on end—and exhilarating to see the film open up as they step up on the roof and play for the awestruck passersby one final concert.

What Todd Haynes is up to with The Velvet Underground is more expansive despite a tighter two-hour time limit. He’s out to tell the history of the eponymous short-lived rock band that infamously sold relatively few albums, but, as Brian Eno would say, ”everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band." Haynes gets the information across, but he does so in a concisely sweeping cultural biography of an entire moment in the New York City modern art scene of the 60s and 70s. Haynes is no stranger to prodding the lives of musicians in unexpected ways—his infamous Barbie-starring Karen Carpenter biopic Superstar or glam rock roman à clef Velvet Goldmine—or recreating a bygone style—Far from Heaven’s Sirkian colors and modes. Here he expertly puts us in a particular time, and mindset. The movie flows with music, of course, to situate us in the influences, contemporaries, and the work itself from bandmates Lou Reed, John Cale, Maureen Tucker, and Sterling Morrison. We get biographical sketches and plenty of first-hand testimony from those who were there—some newly recorded from living witnesses, others taken from old interviews from those no longer with us. Haynes then layers these audio elements into an all-consuming aesthetic experience. He is constantly giving us two or more things to look at—the screen is split two, four, six, even twelve times over with separate pieces of wonderfully textured archival finds and some fresh interviews shot in generous vintage stocks. We see clips of television, amateur portraits, movies, ads, news and documentary and self-shot primary-source footage, and, above all, lots of avant-garde films from the time. We see excerpts from radical experimental films from Warhol and Mekas and Anger. We hear from critic Amy Taubin and director John Waters and actress Mary Woronov. At every moment, the screen and the sound is alive with possibility—an exciting and absorbing aesthetic experience. It has a similar entrancing effect to a great museum installation or the striking a-g works it lovingly quotes throughout. Less a dull recitation of a Wikipedia entry set to a YouTube playlist, as so many of these artist biographical documentaries become, Haynes is making a work of art. It not only communicates what the music sounded like and where it came from, it generates what it must’ve felt like to hear it emerge from this particular cultural scene. What a transportingly specific movie, worthy of standing proudly next to the very works it deploys to create its effects.

The End: THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the weakest of its trilogy, and by far the worst of Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies. It’s all climax, an endless battle that does nothing that couldn’t have been accomplished with an extra fifteen or twenty minutes in the last one. And yet, this is likely the last time we’ll get to visit Tolkien’s fantasy world through Jackson’s eyes. For those of us who’ve liked that feeling, it’s bittersweet to see it go. That it’s not as rousing and wistful as the first finale, eleven years ago with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, is almost beside the point. It’s one more chance to go there and back again, to see these landscapes and creatures, marvel at the prodigious attention to detail, and hear the strains of Howard Shore’s melodies, a feat of film scoring nearing John Williams’ Star Wars work for its web of themes. In other words, it’s worth seeing for those who’ve already made it this far.

So maybe it’s helpful to think of Battle of the Five Armies less as a self-contained movie, more as a way for Jackson to create this place on the big screen for the last time. It’s a bestiary: Hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs, horses, elk, giants, wizards, goblins, evil spirits, war bats, giant eagles, bears, a dragon, and more. It’s a map: CGI armies marched around a game board battlefield. It’s an armory: swords, shields, helmets, hammers, clubs, battering rams, bow and arrow. It’s a drawn out conclusion from a creator who doesn’t want to let this story go, who wants to linger in Middle Earth for just five more minutes, then five more, then more. Good thing, then, that Jackson’s skilled with whipping up blockbuster spectacle, splashing his vivid visuals across the wide screen in ceaseless fantastical imagery so big it betrays how small the thinking is of so many of our tentpole directors. Sure, he’s a filmmaker who errs on the side of too much of a good thing – endless stalemates, overdone comic relief – but so be it.

This last Hobbit picture picks up right where the last left off, with the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) emerging from his mountain lair, flying angrily toward the nearest village and leaving his vast stockpiles of gold unattended. In the mountain are the dwarves (led by Richard Armitage), who have a historical claim to the site, and Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the Hobbit who helped them get there. Eventually, the riches are the target of attack by an army of men (led by Luke Evans) and an army of elves (Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, and Evangeline Lilly among them) who want their fair share. The army of orcs right behind them just wants to kill a bunch of people for some reason. I know that’s only three armies, four when you count the dwarves reinforcements, but I must confess I’m not exactly sure how the title’s math works out here.

For the first half of the movie, those computer-animated armies line up behind character actors as everyone argues about who gets the gold and how the fighting’s going to start. Then, the fighting starts, and the armies collide repeatedly in anonymous garbles of digital noise across rocks and fields, up and down the sides of cliffs, and across an icy lagoon. We dip into personal conflicts between recognizable orcs and our big heroes, follow the king of the dwarves and his battle with curse-induced greed, and check in with Gandalf (Ian McKellen) who has important Lord of the Rings foreshadowing to take care of before joining the main battle. Some moments of combat are nicely done – the bit with ice is clever, as is a neat trick involving an elk – but it grows awfully repetitive. You can almost hear the small material as it’s stretched thin to fill time.

The film loses the emotional thread, and its central narrative momentum along with it, as it gets tangled up in the clanging swords, stabbing and bludgeoning. But when the camera comes to rest on Bilbo Baggins, with Freeman's performance as good as always, the film finds its center. He’s taken aback by the developments, is ready to help his friends even when they disagree with his strategy, and bravely stands in the thick of it even when danger is great. When it’s all over, he is happy to have had this experience and even happier to go home. And so Five Armies brings him there, eventually. It wraps up dangling plot threads, resolves its cliffhangers, and joins up with the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring quite nicely. Along the way we have to slog through some colossally uninvolving battle business, but Jackson brings it home, to the Shire and the Hobbits, the coziest corner of Middle Earth, safe and sound. He asks your indulgence, tries your patience, but eventually delivers some small rewards.

Into the Fire: THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG

Peter Jackson returns yet again to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical Middle Earth with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second of three films devoted to the comparatively slim novel that precedes The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Some find that reason enough to dislike the film, but why get hung up on what it isn’t and miss the chance to luxuriate in what it is? To dismiss the expansion of Tolkien’s smaller story is to miss the rich detail Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro find. This is filmmaking as worldbuilding, a creation of a space that’s fun to visit with new characters and sights around every corner. When we wander into the home of a giant man who is also sometimes a bear, there is a sense of discovery and history. It feels somehow right that such a person would exist in this world, and as he sadly admits to being the last of his species, there’s a real sense of loss. We could follow him out into his own film and probably find something interesting. We won’t, but the sense of a fully realized world is impressive and goes a long way to selling the movie’s colorful adventure plotting.

When last we saw our Hobbit friend Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), he was with the once and future dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) and his band of dwarves on a journey to enter the Lonely Mountain and reclaim their home and their gold from Smaug, a powerful dragon. They’re continuing their quest here, getting into one scrape after another, each only a danger for as long as the plot requires (and sometimes longer) until the next danger pops up. Here there be giant spiders, packs of angry orcs, aloof wood-elves, and, of course, one large fire-breathing dragon. He stretches across the entire screen that only captures his full wingspan in wide shots. (The beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, words rumbling out with booming augmented bass.) Expert spectacle, the film is filled with elaborate action sequences overflowing with visual gags. In one early scene, an elf shoots two orcs with one arrow. Later, a barrel pops up out of roaring rapids and rolls over baddies on the shore, Rube Goldberg serendipity aiding our heroes.

Also helping (and sometimes threatening) our heroes are two elves – one, Orlando Bloom, a familiar face from The Lord of the Rings, the other, Evangeline Lilly, added to give the film a gentle wispy subplot about a dwarf who has a crush on her and maybe, just maybe, vice versa. Together they happen to form a reason to have a few more action sequences. One, a tight, claustrophobic nighttime fight in a tiny house, is a nice break from the sweeping New Zealand vistas and cavernous caves. Speaking of subplots, there’s much to do about a dilapidated lake town where the dwarves find help from a human (Luke Evans) who, it’s quickly apparent, has made a habit of defying the orders of the town’s grumpy, selfish ruler (Stephen Fry). Between the elves and the lake town, the quickly sketched politics and history of this fantasy world is a pleasure. Each new location we step into feels fully formed before we got there, and has the surety that it will continue long after we leave.

There’s always something. Compared to The Lord of the Rings end-of-Middle-Earth stakes, this Hobbit, much like the last Hobbit, is lighter fare, bouncier and zippier. But the mythic resonance of these displaced dwarves and archetypical character types – the strong one, the silly one, and smitten one, the brave one – give the whole picture a fine kick. Freeman’s Bilbo is especially sympathetic, in over his head, but trying so very hard to stay brave and get braver. Our heroes are so very likable, we want to see them succeed. And the sights Jackson shows us are so wonderful and varied, it’s clear Middle Earth is a place worth fighting for. At one point Bilbo sits atop a tree, hundreds of butterflies taking wing around him as he looks across a sun-dappled skyline, a shimmering lake in the distance and, further on, a misty mountain. I’d go there and back again any day.

Rarely diverting its attention from the one-thing-after-another journey of the dwarves, Jackson occasionally drifts away with the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen). I’m not sure what sidetrack he’s wandering down, but that he at one point appears to be fighting a big black cloud tells you everything you need to know about just how seriously to take this. That is to say, enough to feel it, but not so much you can't smile at sillier touches, sometimes both at once. It’s a grand sweeping adventure built out of mythic components, a sense of its own history, and ripe B-movie fantasy. I had to smile when the king of the wood elves (Lee Pace) shows up wearing a crown made out of branches. It just makes sense. Best approached by responding to the surface pulpy fantasy and letting the big emotion underneath grow and bubble, The Desolation of Smaug is all about creating a world, giving space to get lost in it, and allowing plenty of time to do so.

This is epic, light-hearted fantasy as bustling adventure. Jackson’s a sharp enough visual filmmaker to give us movie pleasures of the highest order. A big highlight is that dragon Scrooge McDuck-ing it up in a pile of gold, slowly revealed in his enormity through coy editing. But even simple visual moments, like a shot that finds a worried little girl in the foreground, unaware of the orcs prowling the rooftops behind her, silhouetted in the background, is a great punch of imagery, simple and true. This may be a film that paints in broad strokes, but the surface details are colored in beautifully. It actually delivers the blockbuster exhilaration, the immense pleasures of expansive spectacle, so many films promise, but so few deliver. Jackson, like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron, knows how to build gigantic special effects and cohesive worlds into something that carries real weight and lots of fun.

Back Again: THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a curious film. It’s an unhurried adventure film that will arrive at many thrilling cliffhangers eventually and whenever it feels like it. It’s a film possessed with its own rhythms and pacing, a sometimes-welcome casual disregard for the conventions of blockbuster filmmaking. Oh, it is still stuffed to the gills with action, incident, quips, and effects, but such standard spectacle requirements are served up with unusual timing. Returning J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy realm of Middle Earth to movie screens for the first time since The Lord of the Rings trilogy wrapped up in 2003, writer-director Peter Jackson is clearly enjoying time spent in this world. He shows it to us in detail, unapologetically luxuriating in every bit of his film’s backstories, tangents, and rumination of conflict to come. As someone who saw and enjoyed the three earlier films when they rolled through theaters a decade ago, but hasn’t seen any of them all the way through in the time since, I was struck by how much I was glad to be back in the world of travelers walking through sweeping second unit landscapes to the tune of a great Howard Shore score.

But though the world is the same, it’s a much different kind of story this time around. From what I recall, Rings had narrative drive, a quick pace, world-ending stakes, and deep wells of emotion. But of course, each of those films adapted one novel each. An Unexpected Journey has been adapted by Jackson (along with Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo Del Toro) from just a hundred or so pages from Tolkien’s comparatively slender prequel novel. Instead of a sweeping quest to save Middle Earth from certain doom, we’re following a scrappy band of dwarves on a mission to regain their homeland (and treasure) from a dragon. It’s a simpler quest, one played lighter and more boisterously entertaining on the page and so, you’d think, lends itself less to the kind of bombast and self importance in which Jackson is fully prepared to indulge. Though the first Hobbit film is ultimately slighter in some ways than the epic weight of the previous trilogy, it’s a worthy film all its own that works differently as it strikes off to tell a story all its own.

We start, after lengthy introductory expository scenes that takes us hither and yon through time and space, with a young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), sixty years before he’ll leave his precious cursed ring to Frodo (Elijah Wood) and begin the events we’ve previously seen dramatized. Bilbo is visited by the great wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) who insufficiently prepares him for a visit by the aforementioned band of dwarves, a raucous, hungry bunch who laugh and sing, but turn gravely seriously when discussing the logistics of their plans. Led by their king-in-exile Thorin (Richard Armitage), twelve dwarves prepare for the long trek to the Lonely Mountain where they hope to capture what’s rightfully theirs from the fearsome Smaug, a creature here only glimpsed through shadow and fire in flashback.

After some expected hemming and hawing, Bilbo decides to head off with the group for the sake of adventure. The journey will take them into contact with aloof regal elves, vengeful slimy orcs, an eccentric woodlands wizard, hungry, dimwitted trolls, and, in the film’s best scene, the pathetic Gollum (Andy Serkis) ready for riddles. From the peaks of sentient mountains to the dewy caverns of pimply goblins, these adventurers trudge, trying desperately to keep the group together and survive along the way to their destination. Their task is a personal one of revenge and honor. Unlike the clear, heavy burden of the stakes in the trilogy, this film is an epic episodic adventure of inner drive and private motivations. There are hints at powerful emotions undergirding it all, themes of unintended consequences and the ways choices made in the heat of the moment reverberate through time and can lead to outcomes both good and bad. It’ll be interesting to see if and how these thematic through-lines are teased out in films to come.

As it is, An Unexpected Journey is a fine, fun fantasy film, involving and even a little bit moving around the edges. The design is seamless and impeccable. The effects work is impressive. The protagonists are largely loveable, funny and sympathetic. The villains are vague yet despicable all the same. The action, when it arrives, is generally well done, tense, exceedingly well choreographed, and even with some wit on occasion. This is the kind of film with the room and will to explore just about anything it would like to do. Veer off to spend some time with a sick hedgehog? Why not? Pause for a meeting between Gandalf and some characters from the Rings trilogy while Bilbo and the dwarfs get a head start? Sure! It gives the whole thing a feeling of existing in a rich, lived-in fantasy world that inevitably lost me from time to time, but I joined back up with it soon enough. Jackson makes Middle Earth the kind of place that seems to go on forever in every direction out of frame. If you fall under its spell, it’s the kind of nearly-three-hour movie that feels three hours in a good way. It won me over and nearly pushed me away and then won me back again a few times over, and by the time the credits started I was still ready for more.

Since this particular film is available in so many different – and contentious – viewing options, it’s worth noting for the record that I saw it in 24fps 2D.