"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" is the culmination of the much-loved franchise, and Peter Jackson made no room for peewee endings. The 52-year-old esteemed director has arranged a finale he found most fitting to punctuate "The Hobbit," and he will pull that off by having Middle-Earth factions engage in a 45-minute battle at the base of the Lonely Mountain to hoard the treasure of Erebor.
With something this big, Jackson made intricate plans in perfecting the pin-up scene.
He has been quoted as saying, "Before we could lose 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."
Now that that crazy information is out of the way, fans may now understand the reason behind the movie tagged as the darkest and most bloodthirsty installment. But before anyone can worry about the audience sleeping through the rest of the film, Jackson has already got that covered.
"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," says Jackson in Entertainment Weekly. "Otherwise the audience just ends up with battle fatigue."
Laying bare the enduring 45-minute war for the reclaimed treasure, Jackson was generous enough to provide a diagram for fans. It's unclear though whether his visual was proven helpful to them. Nevertheless, the appearance of the eagles was a bit of an attention-getter, in a not really likeable way. Jackson, yet again and to no one's surprise, has answers for this, too.
"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. So here they're just part of the plan, not the saviors," he stated via Movie Pilot.
Jackson stated that the upcoming finale film bridges the gap between "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." The latter takes place 60 years after the events in The Battle of Five Armies and starts with Frodo Baggins inheriting The One Ring that his uncle Bilbo found during his adventures with Thorin Oakenshield and his band of dwarves.
"The Hobbit" trilogy was based on the J. R. R. Tolkien best selling series of the same name.
"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" stars Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins), Ian Holm (old Bilbo Baggins), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Elijah Wood (Frodo Baggins), Richard Armitage (Thorin Oakenshield), Benedict Cumberbatch (Smaug and the Necromancer/Sauron), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Evangeline Lilly (Tauriel), among many others.
The conclusion of the epic trilogy will hit the silver screen on Dec. 17.
