This week’s selection is something a little different, not least of which because I can’t actually embed the video here. You’ll have to click through to this page to see it. The song you’ll hear there is “The Last Goodbye,” written and performed by the actor Billy Boyd and which will play over the end credits of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies when it opens next month. Five Armies is, of course, the concluding chapter of Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on JRR Tolkien’s beloved The Hobbit, and Jackson’s sixth epic film set in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.
I’ll confess that I haven’t been anywhere near as captivated by the Hobbit films as I was with the earlier Lord of the Rings trilogy. I think Jackson made a tremendous mistake in trying to expand a relatively modest children’s book into a sprawling epic. The story could’ve been told in one or possibly two films at most, and probably in much more concise films (i.e., shorter ones), too. The result is that the Hobbit trilogy feels much like Bilbo Baggins described himself in The Fellowship of the Ring: stretched thin like butter scraped over too much bread. Where The Lord of the Rings trilogy carried the joy and wonder of discovering a place we somehow always knew existed but never thought we’d actually see, the Hobbit movies have a tired, been-there-done-that quality to them. Honestly, I don’t even remember the first two with any degree of clarity (I only saw them once each, as opposed to the LOTR trilogy, which I’ve watched several times), and I view the coming of the third chapter with more a sense of weary obligation than enthused anticipation.
That said, Jackson’s vision of Middle-Earth does feel like a real place to me, as real in my mind and yet as tantalizingly inaccessible as Tatooine or the bridge of the original starship Enterprise, or the hometown I grew up in that is now so changed I no longer recognize it as the place I once roamed on my red Schwinn with the banana seat. And knowing that The Battle of the Five Armies is the last time we’ll get to visit this wonderful landscape — at least as its been realized by Jackson and his people — saddens me. Billy Boyd’s song and the video that accompanies it — currently an Entertainment Weekly exclusive, hence the need to click over to that page — capitalizes on this sentiment. And it’s devastatingly bittersweet and lovely.
If you ever loved the cinematic Middle-Earth, even if you’ve grown weary of hobbits and orcs after five movies… give it a view.
