Quite lovely

Rating: 8/10 (10 November 2018)

There's a lesson for filmmakers in the fact that Peter Jackson's best foray into Middle Earth was also his smallest.
The Fellowship of the Ring introduced filmgoers to hobbits and the shire, elves and Rivendell, wizards and balrogs. But it did so on a smaller scale than that of later films, focusing on the journey of a few protagonists. Ironically, restricting the characters and locales magnified the sense of drama, and heightened the tension. We actually cared about what happened to the fellowship.
As the films grew in scope and grandeur, as makeup and models were replaced by pixels, that sense of precariousness (preciousness?) was lost. The climactic battles in Return of the King involved, first, a computer-generated horde of ghosts swarming a computer-generated horde of orcs, and then a computer-generated horde of orcs being swallowed by a computer-generated earthquake.
Jackson has ignored the lessons he should have learned from making The Lord of the Rings. His Hobbit flicks are comically overstuffed, a seven-hour epic drawn from the shortest of Tolkien's Middle Earth books and filled with plotlines that appeared nowhere in the original text. With Battle of the Five Armies, the series culminates in a multi-hour depiction of violence that in the novel takes up just a few pages.
Many have likened the action of this battle to a video game cut scene-the portions of a game in which there is no actual gameplay, just animation revealing a piece of the plot or a bit of adventure taking place elsewhere. This is both accurate and overly generous. At least most cut scenes are a minute or two in length.