The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies





Someone needs to take a stop watch to this film -- Alfred the silly Laketown guy definitely has more screentime than Gandalf, and he might have more screentime than Bilbo.

I liked the film but it has all the same flaws as the first two. Nobody who was disappointed by those is going to come around this time. In DESOLATION OF SMAUG there were too many orc scenes that killed the pacing, and in BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES the same is true of Lake-town scenes. (Seriously. We keep going back to the people of Lake-town. Over and over and over again.)

The emotional stuff all works. Freeman and Armitage are flat-out great, and Jackson is smart enough with the actual battle to let the bigger picture fall away in the end and focus on the character bits.

P.S. The Aragorn shout-out is so ham-fisted that Thranduil might as well look in the camera and say, "THE LORD OF THE RINGS is currently available on Amazon.com."

This movie was all battle and kinda feels less like a LOTR movie than any of the others. It's basically set in one place the entire time. The battle is, of course, a joy to watch but I was a bit disapointed in Smaugs Attack at the beginning (which should have been at the end of Desolation). Overall it's a really entertaining movie with great visuals but it didn't feel like a complete movie. Best comparison is probably Deathly Hallows 2. Freeman is once again great as Bilbo but as TDS already mentioned, he's not really a big part of the movie. The highlight was Armitage and, surprisingly, Lee Pace this time. Also, it's just too short for a movie set in the LOTR universe. Yeah it moves at a quick pace but it feels a lot less epic. I'm hoping for at least 40 additional minutes when the Extended Edition comes out.

Just watch the first 40 minutes of FOTR and by that time you'll forget all about The Hobbit

Very disappointing and the worst Middle Earth film to date. Also one that functions least as a standalone film.

My franchise ratings:

1. Return of the King - A/A+
2. The Two Towers - A
3. The Fellowship of the Ring - B+
4. The Desolation of Smaug - B+
5. An Unexpected Journey - B
6. The Battle of the Five Armies - C+

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING - A
THE TWO TOWERS - A
THE RETURN OF THE KING - A
AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY - B-
THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG - B-
THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES - B

There was a focus here -- both emotionally and in terms of plot -- that was missing from the other two HOBBIT films.

The Fellowship of the Ring: A+
The Two Towers: A+
The Return of the King: A+ (my favorite)

An Unexpected Journey: A-
Desolation of Smaug: A-
The Battle of the Five Armies: A-/B+

Still, Lord of the Rings is SO MUCH above The Hobbit.

Based on your grades You'd think they were a little above hobbit.

I'm gonna wait on grading this. My first impression was that I was underwhelmed. I saw it last night with a full house. After the show other folks in my meetup group were all raves. They loved it. It did receive applause at the end. I thought it was rushed and slow at the same time and extremely vfx heavy. It did have a nice climax portion. Oh, I know I did hate that the Smaug story was not wrapped up in part 2. He's here for like 5 minutes. It's ridiculous. I will see it again Monday for the marathon and judge it then.

bleh

Shit I hate what I'm hearing. The battle dominates the film. Crossing over to Laketown (which is the worst part of the whole Middle Earth saga) - doesn't sound good at all.

It really should have been only two films all up.

It's decent and wraps up the trilogy well. The biggest problem I had with it is it overestimates the audience's investment in Thorin (Richard Armitage), who is easily one of the most boring characters in this franchise. All of his scenes are deathly dull. Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen and the other key supporting cast members all shine and Evangeline Lilly continues to be the best character in this series - I wanted more of her though I was satisfied with the closure we got for her character. It wraps things up well as well as tying them together with the original trilogy, and the action scenes are well done. It runs long like all of these movies do but it's worth seeing if you're a fan of the franchise. It's far better than the unbearably dull first installment. Desolation of Smaug was ultimately a more fun, exciting film though, IMO, so I was honestly a tad disappointed (though who am I to judge? This really isn't my franchise). B-

May have to skip this one.

I saw it again over the weekend and I'll have to lower the grade to B+ bordering on B. It's easily the worst of the 6.

I love Middle Earth. While I was underwhelmed by this movie (it is my least favorite of the 6), I was still entertained, though annoyed by some things. B+

Saw it a second time. Definitely better than THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG, which fell to pieces on a rewatch.

My immediate post-viewing reaction is that was goddamn stupid.

After five three-hour films, thirteen years, hundreds of millions of dollars spent and earned, seventeen Academy Awards, and thousands of miles traversed on-screen, director Peter Jackson's iconic, J. R. R. Tolkien-derived Middle-earth saga comes to a decidedly uneven end with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the third and final prequel to The Lord of the Rings. There is no way around the truth, cold and hard as it is: this is the worst of the six films. In fact, as a fan (though not a particularly ardent one), it is the only entry in the series I do not rate as a satisfying picture. So much goes wrong. One flaw is predictable: to the give the second film, The Desolation of Smaug, a grim, dramatic, and abrupt to-be-continued ending, the start of this film was sacrificed a year ago. So, it begins. Infuriated dragon Smaug is laying waste to a town of men. We as an audience are disconnected, disoriented. The dragon dies and becomes an almost instant afterthought. The desolation of Smaug is over. Shrug. Also becoming an afterthought here, sadly, is title character Bilbo Baggins, Shire-born master burglar. The wonderful Martin Freeman is still a charismatic, grounded, slightly mischievous, and ultimately noble presence in the role, but he is often crowded to the edge of the frame and the story. The Hobbit now has to remind itself to include the hobbit.

In his stead are vast, brutal, ambitious, and interminable sequences of combat: elf versus dwarf, dwarf versus goblin, man versus orc, and so on and so forth times infinity. It becomes an exhausting spectacle, and moments of genuine excitement and ferocity are too infrequent. The limited scope is also dispiriting. The armies fight outside the Lonely Mountain. They fight in the town a mile from the Lonely Mountain. They fight on a glacier a mile from the town near the Lonely Mountain. There is the dampening sense here of a film racing and screaming and starting fires, but never moving anywhere particularly fast despite the outward pomp and instances of indulgent fan service, including absurd, please-cheer displays of aerobatic daring by Orlando Bloom's returning Legolas, no longer as sexy and dynamic as he used to be. The film is also curiously disinterested in resolving certain subplots (despite a scenery-devouring cameo by Cate Blanchett, the confirmation of Sauron's impending return to power plays more as a rushed obligation than a foreboding revelation) or saying a proper farewell to a catalog of characters unique to the prequels, such as barely-glimpsed shape-shifter Beorn.

C

My God, why did they devote so much screen time to Stephen Fry's mayor's annoying, rotten-toothed henchman? Particularly considering the absence of any brutal-death catharsis.

I do believe Richard Armitage did an admirable job portraying Thorin over the course of the three films, particularly teasing the character's navigation of the fine line between righteous purpose and power-mad insanity.

I still can't believe how they could mess up the final film this bad. I mostly agree with David, though see the film slightly better (C+, verging on B-). But did Peter Jackson lose the bet to that guy playing Alfred and had to give him as much screentime as to Martin Freeman? This is verging on Jar-Jar Binks-ism!

My favorite scene of the movie was Beorn jumping off an eagle, turning into a bear during the drop, then charging through orcs. It lasted all of 10 seconds.

This is a very frustrating film for a fan of Middle Earth. It's so disjointed with so many things that make you go, "huh?". For every cool thing in the movie like the above mentioned scene, there are two others that don't make sense. Why did Alfred get so much screen time? There wasn't even a payoff.

Then there's the cool scene where Galadriel shows why she's so revered, banishing Sauron by herself. That was pretty cool. But why did they have to overdo the fight scene with the 9? Yeah it was cool to see Saruman, Elrond, and Galadriel backing up Gandalf fighting the 9, but the fight quickly became cartoony. It honestly feels like Peter Jackson was thinking, almost done, let's just finish it, rather than doing it right.

I'm down grading to a B. There was still plenty for me to enjoy, it was just frustrating having to navigate through the things that didn't make sense.

Jackson and Boyens just rave over the guy who plays Alfrid in the DESOLATION OF SMAUG EE commentary. Seems likely they just gave him a ton of new material in reshoots and didn't, you know, cut any of it.

[over her dwarf lover's dead body]
"IS THIS LOVE?! WHY DOES IT HURT SO?!"
"Because 'twas real!"

*shoots self in head*

"In the wild, he is known as Strider. YOU WILL HAVE TO DISCOVER HIS REAL NAME FOR YOURSELF!"

*returns from the dead to shoot self again*

YOU HAVE THOSE TWO SCENES FLIPPED THE STRIDER REFERENCE COMES FIRST GOD GET IT RIGHT.

It also felt a bit strange how they shoehorned in this sub-subplot regarding Legolas having mommy issues.

Ironically, they didn't do him any favors, really. He's gonna be quite hated.