Entertaining but no masterpiece

Rating: 1/10 (27 December 2014)

These are my thoughts on The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies after seeing it last night.
The story of The Battle of the Five Armes takes off right where the previous installment ended. Smaug flees from the mountain and tries to destroy the city of Lake-town. As expected, Bard succeeds in killing the dragon with the help of his son. The addition of Bard's son gives more emotional weight to the impressive first five minutes of the movie. During the attack of Smaug, the mayor (who tried to make a run with the city's gold) gets killed but his servant Alfrid survives and receives much screen time later on, probably for comic relief between the long action scenes, but his jokes were nothing special and I think that he took too much attention away from the heroic Bard. I don't understand why he got more screen time than poor Beorn. I only saw a glimpse of Beorn in this movie and he only got a few minutes of screen time in the previous installment.
After Smaug's death, more groups (humans, elves, dwarfs, orcs) try to lay their hands on the treasure that is stored under the mountain, but Thorin does not allow anybody to go near his gold. He becomes madder by the minute and that process visualized in a beautiful scene where he is absorbed into a liquid golden floor (looks like something from the hand of Del Toro?) Armitrage did a very good job in portraying Thorin's madness. His acting is sublime. After speaking with Bilbo and dwarf Dwalin, Thorin realizes he has to participate in the battle and with the help of his fellow dwarfs (suddenly without wearing heavy armor), the army of dwarfs (under the leadership of a CGI!? Dain Ironfoot) are able to defeat the first orc army. I have no idea how dozen dwarfs could turn the tides, but the battle of the five armies does not make any sense at all. Gigantic dragon worms, trolls with weird arms and other creatures show up to help the orcs even though there is no mention of those in the book.
The battle itself is visually impressive and maybe a bit too overwhelming, but I sometimes had the feeling of watching a massive cut scenes of a video game. Most of the events in the fight are similar to what we have seen in Lord of the Rings, so the fight was not a great addition to the Middle Earth saga. At times, the battle even looked like a parody of The Lord of the Rings. For example, Legolas was able to transport himself with evil bats like Kratos did in God of War. He even defied the laws of gravity. In his duel with Bolg, he was able to step on flying stone blocks of a torn floor to prevent a deep fall There was no question about Legolas inhuman agility in Lord of the Rigns, but The Hobbit took this a step too far. During the battle, there are more implausible events, like the sudden occurrence of goats that the dwarfs use to transport and a suddenly wiped out orc army. Furthermore, Bilbo is able to take out dangerous orcs by throwing rocks at their skulls...
Concerning the 'freckled' elf Tauriel, it is nice to see a strong female character, but she was clearly added as motive for Kili's emotional death during the fight with Bolg. After Kili's death, her story is finished. Fili dies a few moments earlier by the hands of orc leader Azoc. Fili and Kili both die while defending Thorin in the book. The strong bond between both brothers in the book was unfortunately not exploited by Jackson. And of course, Thorin kills Azoc after the giant orc floats quietly beneath the icy surface of a lake before finding his death. Thorin and the other Fili and Kili do not get buried and there is no further mention of what happens with the treasure in the mountain, Bard, Tauriel and the people of Laketown even though that it is written in the final pages in the book. So despite stretching out for 8.5 hours the trilogy still has some loose ends. That is very sloppy of the director. The story ends with Thanduils' message to Legolas that he should look for Aragorn (is that even in coherence with Tolkien's writings?) and Bilbo returning to his home in the Shire after a last few words with Gandalf.
In conclusion, Peter Jackson failed in setting up a trilogy that is a worthy prequel to the Lord of the Rings. The amount of dialogue and character development in the book was too little to spread over three long movies. This resulted in poor emotional bonding with the characters. The frame of the original story was too thin and by adding new stuff to fill it up, Jackson lost track of some important chapters and details in the book. I think what happened to the Hobbit is similar tor to tuning a cheap car. You can try to upgrade it by adding and replacing parts, but it will never be as cool as a Ferrari or Lamborghini. However, I liked the part where Galadriel,Saruman and Elrond save Gandalf and Galadriel scares the eye of Sauron to Mordor. I thought that that was pretty cool.
A moderate LOTR fan