Review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) by Benjamin M — 21 Apr 2015

I'm pretty sure I've said this in my reviews of An Unexpected Journey and Desolation of Smaug, all leading to this climax, but there are just simply too many dwarves in Thorin's group for them to be effective as a group.

If you were to ask me to name every goddamn dwarf in the group I honestly could not do it. I could give you Thorin, Kili and Fili. That's it. There's the old guy with the white beard, but I cannot name him.

There's James Nesbitt, but I forget his name as well, even though he played a prominent part in An Unexpected Journey and was, honestly, forgotten about in the other two movies. And that's a fucking waste of a talented actor.

There's the fat one. There's the one whose voice reminds me of Gerard Butler. There's the one whose hair is styled like three shark fins, one on the top and two on the side. There's the ginger who kinda looks like he's retarded.

I think that's 9. I can't find a way to describe the other three because I simply do not remember them. The point is that they had THREE FUCKING MOVIES to make you care about these characters and they failed horrifically.

There wasn't a need for these many dwarves in Thorin's circle if only three of them, excluding Thorin himself, were of any use. I remember Boromir, a character that died in the first Lord of the Rings movie, yet I cannot remember the names of the dwarves in a movie that I finished less than 12 hours ago.

That is unacceptable. If I was Peter Jackson and I had my way I honestly would've killed off 8-9 of these dwarves in the first film. Why clutter things up with pointless characters that serve absolutely no fucking purpose? They've already taken liberties with the source material so why not remove the useless characters.

Another thing I'm pretty sure I mentioned in my Desolation of Smaug review is the fact that this series, unlike LOTR, does not have a clear endgame in sight. In LOTR the endgame, clearly, was the destruction of the ring by throwing it into Mount Doom.

Simple. Yes, there were various subplots going on and characters were fleshed out and given their own little side stuff to do, but there was never a moment in that series where you didn't know what was supposed to happen to the ring.

It was meant to be destroyed and they never let you forget that. The Hobbit lacks that narrative focus. Yes, part of it is the dwarves taking back Erebor, but that hardly seems like something anyone should care about.

While it is central to the story in that everything climaxes around the dwarves taking back Erebor and the riches that are inside it, but it's not something that I found to be all that intriguing to be honest.

I've no doubt that the books are considerably better than the films themselves, but the films lack a certain something that would've taken it to the next level. It just doesn't feel as deep or as interesting as Lord of the Rings.

There are a shit-ton of characters. Only a few of them truly stand out and the rest just come across as necessary filler. The story is certainly muddled to the point where you just don't really care about anything that's going on.

At least that's how I felt. I don't wanna say that this is a disaster, because it's not, and at least the film was what I would call good. But for the supposed finale to an 'epic' trilogy, this is incredibly disappointing.

Disappointing in the sense not that my own expectations were high, since I honestly wasn't that excited for the trilogy in the first place once Peter Jackson took over for Guillermo del Toro, more in the sense of not actively looking forward to the films.

Not that I didn't want to see, just that I wasn't excited to watch them, if you know what I mean. I know I've given all the films in the series positive reviews, with this being the worst reviewed of all, but I was honestly a little lukewarm on the entire trilogy as a whole.

In the sense that, even knowing that it was a trilogy, I wasn't really that excited for the sequel. Part of the reason, in my mind, that I gave An Unexpected Journey such a positive review must've been the novelty of being back in Middle-Earth again and the low expectations I had going into the film.

It's very well possible that, if I were to go back and watch An Unexpected Journey again today, I'd probably give it a lower score. I think Desolation of Smaug would stay the at the same range.

I just don't know what it is about this movie but it never really got going. There's a lot of action but even that feels unsatisfactory. The story didn't exactly do much for me either, it just doesn't feel like it's going anywhere.

The problem I have with the action, and most of this trilogy to be honest, is its over-reliance on CGi. Don't get me wrong, a film such as this NEEDS CGi, but it's to the point that the action suffers for it because it never feels like the characters are actually fighting with anything.

LOTR worked in part because of so much of it was also live-action. Most of the orcs were actually actors in make-up to look like orcs. It also mixed green-screen with real-life New Zealand landscapes.

Because of that there was a certain 'reality' to it in that it felt human, it had character, and it had life. In this movie, for example, the two villainous orcs are both completely CG. If they did live-action stuff with orcs, the actors were so covered up in armor that the make-up work was probably very minimal.

About 80-85% of this movie is computer-generated. To the point where some actors look like they were computer generated as well. Legolas, for one, with all his make-up, looked absolutely ridiculous. And I get the reasoning behind all the CG.

It's far less expensive than doing practical make-up on a ton of actors every day of filming. But there's so little real live-action stuff in the film that it feels like I'm watching a videogame instead of a movie.

It's completely soulless. And that's not to say that all videogames are soulless, because that couldn't be farther from the truth, that's just how this movie comes across. You're just watching a very nice looking videogame.

There's no sense of placement to the action. Sometimes the actors are fighting with the orcs and it just feels like they're hitting a dummy and clumsily being edited in to make it look like they're fighting with an orc.

There's this scene where Thorin, walking on the lake of gold that they tried to drown Smaug in, gold which has now harderned, as he sees how the greed has driven him mad and will drive him to his end.

The gold itself looks absolutely terrible, like a big lake of cheese. Honestly the CG was the worst part of the film, I felt. The scene where Bilbo makes his way back to the shire, with minimal CG work, is the first time the film feels like it has some life in it.

You know why that was? It was because they actually shot it on location and it was a beautiful place. There's no beauty in this world that Peter Jackson and his people have helped create. I'm sure they worked hard, but there's no beauty in it.

And the entire thing is just so anticlimactic. It doesn't feel like the ending of an epic trilogy. It feels like the ending to a regular movie. It doesn't seem like something that has had a three-year build-up to the payoff.

The one thing I will say about this is the fact that it should be a lot of fun to end this movie and go straight into the LOTR trilogy. I don't know how long it would take you to get through all six movies, but it would be a fun experiment to try out.

Not that I would do that since it takes me so long to make it through a movie that's only 90 minutes, much less six movies all clocking in at 140+ minutes each. Some even go longer than three hours.

Plus, taken into consideration my disappointment for this trilogy, I hardly think I'm gonna want to watch them all back-to-back again. Look this film is good, do not misunderstand me. It's fairly solid fantasy fare.

But its myriad of issues do almost cripple this film past the point of no return. It's only ever just good and nothing more than that. Anticlimactic and unsatisfactory way to end the trilogy that's for damn sure.

But it's a movie that, if you watched the other two films, you have to see in order to get to the story's natural conclusion. I can't exactly give it a wholehearted recommendation though. Maybe just a rental, at best.