LOTR minus a coherent plot

Rating: 6/10 (2 January 2015)

* Contains Spoilers * This is what you get if you take all the elements of the Lord of the Rings films, put them all together, but then forget to weave it all together with a convincing and coherent narrative.
What a disappointment! I am a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy but the Hobbit trilogy has really struggled to recreate the type of epic magic of LOTR. It was always going to be a difficult task, as the LOTR trilogy is epic to begin with - the plot lines are clear, and there are three books to neatly transform into three films.
Someone... somewhere... along the way, decided to stretch the story of "the Hobbit" out over three films - no easy task. When they realised there really wasn't enough content for that, it seems that they just decided to make lots of stuff up. In my opinion, that's fine, as long as it works (some people will understandably seriously disagree on this point). Sadly, it doesn't quite work here.
Return of the King has the type of once-in-a-generation film scenes of the Riders of Rohan charging into the fields of Pellenor, for example. This is the type of film moment we all remember but it wasn't just plonked into the film out of nowhere. This moment was carefully set up over the three films (books) to such an extent that it is one of the most exhilarating moments in any film ever. In this film, we have the "Eagles" arrive to save the day along with a load of erm... animal/people things, but at no stage do we understand why any of this has happened. It just does, and the day is won. And it falls a bit flat. It's as the narrative that got us to this final film wasn't quite right. And this is explainable, partially by the fact they strayed so far from the original story.
The character development is also sadly lacking across these films. I think we were supposed to fall in love with the seven (or however many there were) Dwarfs throughout these films, but I can barely remember a name of a single one of them apart from King Thorin. The makers rely heavily on transplanting established characters from LOTR into this picture to move things along, to such an extent that I am astonished they didn't toss "Baby Frodo" in right at the end. It all feels a little contrived and almost reminds you of the Star Wars prequels where much loved characters were shoehorned in for the sake of making the audience say "oh yes, I know that face".
Legolas, Saruman, Galadriel, the guy from the Matrix. They could all have just not been in this film and it wouldn't have made much difference. Oh actually, that's wrong I nearly cried my eyes out over the heart wrenching side-story about Legolas' mother. Not. (Or was this a horrible set up for a new film based on Lego? Ugggh).
This was not a terrible film, but it hardly comes close to the lofty standards set by Jackson himself.