Review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) by Juan L — 16 Aug 2015

This in my opinion was the only decent one in The Hobbit line of movies, and I am a HUGE fan of the Novels. But there is still some things going wrong here. First of all, I am really bothered by how you guys went through all the trouble of making the orcs look all badass, and then they act like they have never had fighting lessons in their life. I mean, even little dwarfs and hobbits are running around killing them left and right. There is something wrong with this. And it really looks kind of like you're playing Dynasty Warriors or something.

Gandalf keeps trying to tell these morons that there is a huge army of Orcs on the way, but they all would rather argue with each other (how else do you draw out a movie?). Thorin stands there and watches his cousin's people get slaughtered, and then without any sort of explanation snaps out of "the spell" (Gold can cast spells in this movie, but Gandalf apparently cannot). But does Thorin immediately rally the troops to go help the fight? No, he stands there and makes a long melodramatic speech, and when they finally do run out it looks like maybe 15 Dwarves. What the hell are 15 more Dwarves going to do in this situation? Oh here's a thought: let's go after the leader, we'll just easily ride right on through this army that has been destroying us for a half hour now.

So I'm not sure why, but I couldn't stop laughing when the giant troll thing knocked himself out to punch a hole in the wall. But I also had to wonder why they even brought trebuchets at all just to use them for about 15 seconds.

Here you have Gandalf, now he is supposedly like the best wizard around (even before his Zen Buddhism experience), but he really doesn't do anything wizardly. I mean these guys are surrounded by orcs and giant worms (what happened to the worms by the way, they were there for about 30 seconds and then they were gone), you would expect to see him shooting fireballs and all kinds of other stuff like he did in LOTR trilogy. But no, he doesn't even bother to charge his staff with lightning or anything when he hits fully armored orcs in the face. I guess he invested too many stat points into strength and not enough into magicka? If he was going to play battle-mage then why was he not wearing heavy armor? Him and Bilbo pretty much just stand there most of the time and shout things like "fall back." I guess at some point the screenwriters remembered that Bilbo has a magic invisibility ring, because they decided to have him use it for no other purpose than delivering a message in the middle of battle that really didn't do any good anyways. He could have been running around all invisible-like killing orcs, but instead they use him as a postman.

Elf chick decides to go rescue her boyfriend (not in the book), who inevitably dies saving her life. Now the funny thing here is that elf chick herself has killed countless orcs in this Epic, but she gets tossed around like a ragdoll by this one. But of course, Legolas (also not in the book) comes along and is able to easily defeat this orc who for some reason seems to be able to fight a hundred times better than any of the other orcs. Of course, he does this after flying on falling rocks somehow and without even appearing to have super speed. It was absolutely spectacular to witness, though I have to question the physics of this universe they are in.

Elf king tells Legolas to go find Strider (Aragorn), who according to the timeline of the stories was still a child growing up amongst elves. You are telling me that the elves don't know the human ranger in their own kingdom?

All in all, this was not a terrible movie, but it was a terrible Tolkien port. Peter Jackson should have retired a long time ago. Most of the Tolkien fans are adults now. We like adult movies that also feature some form of cohesive logic with regards to how the world operates and what constitutes a wizard. This series was so obviously meant for children.