THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES movie review

Middle Earth Chapter III: Revenge of the Orcs

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the third and final installment in The Hobbit series, and is the final film set in Middle Earth. The film continues mere minutes after where The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug left off. Smaug is about to attack the city of lake town and an army of Orcs is on their way to the Lonely Mountain. Meanwhile, Bilbo still has the One Ring, and Thorin and the company of Dwarves have taken back their Mountain. However, a battle between five major armies of Middle Earth is set to take place on the front yard of the Lonely Mountain.

I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fan, and I quite like The Hobbit films. I do admit they have many problems realted to pacing, character development, and going overboard on special effects, but I still find them quite entertaining. It's definitely not Lord of the Rings quality, but it's a pretty fun watch every December. Now, we have the last installment, and I'm quite satisfied with it.

On the bright side, I predicted that I'd love the first twelve minutes of the movie, and I was right. I still would have preferred it if those first twelve minutes was the finale of the last movie instead of being treated like an after thought in this movie. I mean, I would've liked it if I had time to digest that battle scene and let it sink in before I was thrown into the next event.

One thing this movie, and the previous two Hobbit movies did right, was the Bilbo and Thorin storylines. Yeah, they kinda mucked up their film series by giving us a fellowship that consisted mostly of interchangeable, unmemorable dwarves. However, they did manage to deliver on the Bilbo and Thorin storylines. Both their story arcs come full circle in this movie, and it was executed pretty well. It's definitely no Aragorn becoming King nor Frodo living an adventure, but it did round itself out in the end. Hats off to Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage, they've proven themselves the best thing about this trilogy.

To my surprise, some sequences were better executed than I thought they would've been. I thought the really weak set-up or the bad characters would really affect the conclusion of some storylines, but they managed to make the best out of it,

That's not to say that I was disappointed with other sequences, because I was. Peter Jackson and his pretty bad editing has once again caused a film of his to contain a lot of fat on it. It happened with King Kong, and then again with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and I honestly thought it fixed when there was less fat in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, but no there's so many cringe-worthy, pointless scenes scattered throughout the movie. Most of them containing, the painfully unfunny Alfrid character. My biggest critique of The Hobbit series is that it sometimes gets too caught up on focusing on the bigger Middle Earth that it loses focus on Bilbo, Thorin, and the Dwarves. I get you want to set up Lord of the Rings and build up to this big battle, but don't sight of your characters. It's why we're invested in the journey in the first place.

Speaking of the big battle, the actual Battle of the Five Armies was disappointing. I found it to be cluttered, unfocused, and overly reliant on special effects. It's all over the place, really. Well, for one thing, most of the battle doesn't really focus on characters you're rooting for. Instead, it focuses on the side characters who can really kick ass in a fight, the cool visual effects of giant troll and orc things, everything I didn't want to focus on. There was no real flow through to the battle too. It was basically jumping from one battlefront to the next, getting the best looking kills as possible. Not really the stuff of epics.

I know that made me sound like I didn't like the film, but I actually did find it entertaining. I realize these films have major flaws and the films suffer for it, but I don't hate any of them. The film still has excellent acting, turn-your-brain-off entertaining sequences, and the Bilbo and Thorin stories were quite well done actually. It's not the epic finale to the Middle Earth saga as it was hoped to be, but it still manages to be pretty good and entertaining.