The third chapter of The Hobbit trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies, continues
the adventure after the events of The
Desolation of Smaug. If you are a
fan of epic battles scenes then this movie will be great for you; if you are
expecting a Hobbit movie, it falls short. This chapter is nothing that hasn’t
been done better in films like Lord of
the Rings: The Two Towers.
The dragon, Smaug, has gone to Laketown to speak in volumes
of napalm to the villagers. The dwarves
have taken refuge in the city of Erebor in the Lonely Mountain. They find that
they are now sitting on a wealth of gold and treasures. Armies of Orcs and
Goblins are on their way and groups of elves, men, and dwarves all want a piece
of the dragon hoard.
The movie has a few good things working to its advantage. The
acting is decent and the monster designs are pretty nightmarish. Guillermo del
Toro’s influence is felt in this chapter as the Orcs have terrifying glowing
eyes and there are trolls with limbs removed and replaced with weapons as if
they were pulled out of a Hellraiser
film.
The biggest problem with this film is that it is called The Hobbit and Bilbo Baggins plays a
minor character in his own story. About 90% of this film is about the Humans,
Dwarves, Elves, and long battle scenes among them. There are so many padded
scenes that this movie could be used as shipping material. Some of the battle scenes are fun to watch but,
more often that not, it comes off like a video game cut scene.
This trilogy is the biggest insult to fans of the Lord of
the Rings trilogy. It takes a story that could have easily made a single great
film and bloats it into three mediocre movies. The characters that are
interesting, like Bilbo and Smaug, barely get as much screen time as Thorin or
the more annoying Wormtongue stand-in, Alfrid. The attention to detail is not
even present in these films. Legolas’s eye color changes between scenes in the
films. Director Peter Jackson even admitted they forgot to put in his colored
contacts several times.
This movie is worth seeing if you are a big fan of the
series. If you are not than you will find other versions of this story that
won’t take 9 hours to tell. The effects are fairly laughable and the
fan-service by adding in characters like Legolas and the new character of
Tauriel are just too obviously filler material.
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