Review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) by Loler13Gr — 28 Jan 2015

I really wanted to like this movie but in the end I walked out of the movie theater disappointed. The first 30-40 minutes feel unnecessary and it's only a delay to the battle which is the main event of the movie and consumed about two thirds of the time.

The Gandalf vs The Necromancer storyline , which is really interesting since it was not presented in the book , also feels it was shoved into the movie only to make it a little bit longer. There are scenes that gave me shivers like the final scene or the scene where Aragorn is mentioned ( his name is never mentioned ) but other than that the battle was nothing but a bunch of mediocre CGI dwarvs and goblins fighting each other with some trolls , bats and worms making short appearances.

The love story ( which is not a part of the book ) is doing it's best to keep us guessing about it's end but even that fails to deliver. Finally Legolas and Thranduil are over-powered and kind of ruin the epic battle feeling since Legolas and three dwarvs take on an army of thousand goblins and Thranduil single-handedly kills hundreds of goblins too.

Despite all that the things that made LOTR and the other two Hobbit movies great are there with great performances , breath-taking landscapes , an epic battle against Smaug and a great soundtrack.