Perhaps the Best of the Trilogy

Rating: 8/10 (2 January 2015)

"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" is the final chapter of Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit" trilogy, and this particular film tells the last three or so chapters of J.R.R. Tolkien's book of the same name.
For those who are fans of the book, one thing that will quickly stand out is that the movie takes great liberty with the book, inasmuch as Peter Jackson has made an entire feature length film out of a story that was told in a relatively succinct fashion by Tolkien. Jackson's work expounds on the story that Tolkien left us with, going into much more detail with character development and the story of the battle of the armies itself in this film.
That being said, though, the movie does all of this in a way that is true to the original source material. I didn't feel as though I was watching something that was untrue to Tolkien, but instead a movie that was made to put meat on the skeleton of a story that Tolkien had left us with in the final chapters of "The Hobbit".
The question does arise as to whether the movie is good overall. It's an especially poignant question to ask given that this film is actually getting more scrutiny from reviews and ratings than its two predecessors. I personally would strongly disagree with those assessments. I found "The Battle of the Five Armies" to be on par with, if not better than, "The Desolation of Smaug", both of which are much more enjoyable movies than the initial film in the series, "An Unexpected Journey". "The Desolation of Smaug" is arguably still the best of the three films, but "Five Armies" tells an engaging tale that caps off the series nicely and left me feeling very pleased with the trilogy overall.
Perhaps the weakest part of the film, I felt, was the foreshadowing of Jackson's other Tolkien-inspired trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings" from a decade ago. "Five Armies" tries to set up that separate tale (of which "The Hobbit" movies are prequels) by showing a battle between Sauron vs. Gandalf and others. This battle (a brief scene that diverges from the rest of the movie) suffers from a poor special effects technique that culminates in an odd light show on the screen for a few moments. Still, this doesn't ruin the overall film.
Again, for me this movie may be the best of "The Hobbit" trilogy. It certainly is worth watching, and certainly deserves to be rated more favorably than its "Unexpected Journey" prequel. I'd give it 8 out of 10 stars.