Better Pacing, Same Problems

Rating: 5/10 (23 December 2014)

This will no-doubt be one of the most-reviewed films of the year, but here goes
The Good: The Battle of the Five Armies is well-paced. It's still too long, but the story does not drag and there is engaging action almost all the way through. As always, there is some lovely set and costume design and beautiful natural settings. The cast is talented. The dragon Smaug is fantastically dramatic and riveting, in a carry-over from the previous film. Tauriel (more on her later) and Bard represent the best instincts of this trilogy.
The Bad: The majority of the action is nakedly CGI and resembles video game visualization, in some cases to a truly absurd degree. There is very little focus on the title character, Bilbo Baggins. Too much uninterrupted fighting in the latter half of the film. The matter of the mountain is not clearly resolved, likely owing to too many different sub plots and character motivations being in the mix. Too many of the would-be serious moments are unintentionally funny. There is a plethora of other issues, but many of them are more subjective in nature. Those that I have just mentioned are the more object problems.
Moving onto my subjective observations, the biggest problem with this film and the trilogy that it completes is that of identity crisis. Is it a folksy, personable adventure tale like the book, or is it a deadly serious epic like The Lord of the Rings? Is it an elegantly realized window into a poetic fantasy world like Peter Jackson's first Tolkien trilogy, or is it a wild 3D action adventure? Ultimately, it tries to be all of those things at once and so the whole is overly long and unwieldy, with a rotating sense of focus.
These films did get some individual things right. Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage and Luke Evens are wonderful in the roles of Bilbo, Thorin and Bard, respectively. The cast and acting were never problems, even with the meandering scripts. Smaug was a magnificent fantasy creation, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch and brought to massive, fire-breathing life. It's no accident that the best scenes in the previous films were the ones with the dragon and Gollum, both of them taken almost directly from the book.
But I want to focus on the original character of Tauriel to point out how Peter Jackson's The Hobbit could have been a better story even if it didn't stick to the book verbatim. The book featured virtually no female characters. Fortunately, the films addressed that, but it is Tauriel (a made up character) who fits this story far, far, far better than Galadriel (a canon character and fan favorite on screen since The Fellowship of the Ring).
While Galadriel, Elrond, Saruman, Gandalf and Radagast are occupied with a story arc present almost entirely for the sole purpose of making The Hobbit resemble The Lord of the Rings in ways that the book never did, Tauriel's scenes are intimate and unpretentious, much like those of Bilbo Baggins. Say what one will about the Elf- Dwarf romance, but it was one of the most grounded and personable aspects of these past two films. Personally, I would have preferred a straight-up adaption of the source novel, in one film. However, I think that there was a missed opportunity here to expand the story into multiple films without losing the tone of the book, and Tauriel is the best example of how to do that in a way that is fresh and forward-thinking.
Ultimately, though, these films were not for fans of the book. They were for fans of the Lord of the Rings films. In that sense, the failure of the Hobbit Trilogy is that it mistakenly supposes that those previous films succeeded on spectacle. In fact, they succeeded in the elegance of their execution, well-written stories brought to life by tasteful visuals. This time around, we were presented with an over-extended, thrown-together buildup to a full-throttle throwdown of unhinged action. Is that bad, in and of itself? It depends on the viewer. Not my thing, but I am not everyone.
If you loved An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug, then you will likely enjoy this one, as long as you can handle more nonstop action. That is the primary difference present in The Battle of the Five Armies.