Summary:
The concluding chapter in The Hobbit Trilogy.
My Thoughts:
Despite the fact that The Hobbit Trilogy (“An Unexpected Journey”, “The Desolation of Smaug”, and this film) is far inferior to the Lord of the Rings trilogy in almost all aspects, I was rather excited to watch this particular version of the concluding chapter. This was my first time watching the extended cut (I’d seen the original cut in theaters, but not since), and it is the only movie in the whole Middle Earth saga that received an R rating, so, I sort of hoped this final entry would just be stuffed to the gills with whatever bizarre violent stuff Peter Jackson wanted to throw in without the restrictions of a PG-13 rating; as Jackson started off making gore comedies (“Dead Alive”, “Bad Taste”), I expected this film to earn its R rating, and it sort of did.
“One day I’ll remember. Remember everything that happened: the good, the bad, those who survived… and those that did not.”
Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman, “Ghost Stories”) and the band of dwarves led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage, “The Lodge”) had reached their destination at the end of the previous installment, “The Desolation of Smaug”, and in doing so they awakened the dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch, “1917”) who immediately sets off to destroy Lake Town. After Bard (Luke Evans, “Ma”) slays the dragon, five armies gather around the Lonely Mountain to wage war over the horde of treasure.
So, really, there’s not a lot to talk about with this film in terms of story. Within the first fifteen minutes, Smaug is vanquished and the film just starts to set up for the final battle from there. Our characters are all pretty much at a standstill until that final battle starts, and then once it does start, the battle doesn’t stop almost until the very end of the movie. It is absolutely exhausting, and also rather unsatisfying.
That’s not to say that the battle sequences are all bad, in fact, a lot of the battles are a lot of fun. The problem is that after a while, even the most extreme and ridiculous battle sequences become tawdry and boring when you’re perpetually bombarded with images of violence. I remember watching the “LOTR: The Two Towers” behind the scenes features about the incredibly lengthy Helms Deep battle, and during those sequences, Jackson was very aware of how long he was forcing viewers to endure battles. He made mention that viewers can feel battle fatigue- and that is exactly how I felt by the end of this movie: fatigued, and not in a good way. At the end of “LOTR: Return of the King” I always feel a sense of exhaustion, but it’s the kind of exhaustion one feels after a long hard day of work: a sense of satisfaction and a job well done. At the end of “The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies”, I only felt like I wanted to go to bed and not think about Thorin and his dwarves again for quite some time, and that’s not the kind of feeling one wants to have when leaving a film this epic.
Though there were a lot of problems with the pacing of the film and the overabundance of battles, there were a lot of fun parts too. Before the battles really started to weigh on me, I really found myself enjoying plenty of the fight scenes, and there was one particularly gory fight scene with the dwarves on a sled in the extended edition that made watching the whole film worth it. I really enjoyed the way this film looks (though I wish there’d been a touch less CGI), from the costumes to the sets to the creatures, everything looks gorgeous.
Verdict:
You know, I wish we’d have gotten a shorter more streamlined version of The Hobbit movies, but we didn’t; we got these films, which are overlong, messy, and CGI-polished ADHD extravaganzas. These films are an embarrassment of riches when it comes to Tolkien’s world building and great-looking locations, but they’re also a prime example of what happens when you have little restraint and just decide to cram as much into a movie as you can. While I think the LOTR movies are amongst the best films ever made, I think The Hobbit films are pretty lackluster, but they’re made with love and craft, and they certainly aren’t bad flicks overall.
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