Some good fun but too much new stuff and too many loose ends.

Rating: 3/10 (22 August 2018)

I realize these films are several years old, but maybe this review will help someone who is considering spending a little money on PPV or DVD's. My advice: buy them on sale or watch for them on TV and use your DVR to speed thru all the commercials. I have read the entire LOTR saga, The Hobbit plus the trilogy, at least six times, and The Silmarillion once. I loved the original LOTR trilogy by Peter Jackson. My reaction to the three Hobbit movies? Meh. The first part of my headline above could really apply to all three Hobbit films, not just this extremely disappointing finale. There is way too much extraneous material that was invented by Jackson and his team, obviously in order to bloat a simple, 300-page story into almost nine hours of film. The story could and should have been told in one film, and had Jackson stuck as closely to the book as he tried to do with the LOTR, it probably would have been just as good as those films were. But instead we're "treated" to many unnecessary and often annoying embellishments, chief among them the idiotic "romance" between elf and dwarf. All that does is diminish the significance of the friendship between Legolas and Gimli in the LOTR, in my view. Battle scenes are overdone and repetitious, Legolas must really be Superman in disguise, trolls and giants can't really be such powder puffs in combat, and please, not the eagles again. Moreover, despite the bloated size of this trilogy, it manages to leave out some really important parts of the story, such as Beorn's role in the Battle of the Five Armies. Finally, for anyone who hasn't read the book, the last 30 minutes of BOTFA leaves them scratching their heads wondering what happened to all those people like Thurandil and Beorn and Bard, and what about the Necromancer and Elrond and Galadriel and Saruman? All these loose ends left dangling in the breeze after all that screen time is just inexcusable. If you want to spend some time with the Hobbit, you're much better off just reading the novel. Then go watch the original LOTR trilogy again.