An expected disappointment

Rating: 4/10 (26 December 2014)

I didn't go into this movie expecting much so I was only mildly disappointed. The Desolation of Smaug ended in a pretty awkward cliffhanger and The Battle of Five Armies tries to pick it up from that very spot. All of the buildup with Smaug was in the Desolation of Smaug and quickly disposing of him in the beginning of this movie doesn't work from a story-telling standpoint, simple as that. Clearly there was material here for one, maybe two, great movies as many others have pointed out and chopping up the movie into three pieces and bloating it up really screws up its pacing.
Legolas again defied all laws of physics and essentially became Neo and Super Mario wrapped in one in this film. If a character can do anything with no consequences and doesn't have to follow any kind of internal rules of a movie, there's no tension or drama. Shouldn't Jackson & Co understand this? Legolas wasn't the only on either, pretty much anyone could apparently kill dozens and dozens of these orcs so where's the danger? The decision to implement the antagonists of the trilogy, Azog and Bolg, as CGI characters also really flattened the whole experience because they simply don't have the kind of screen presence a real actor in makeup has. There's really no awe and weight in much of what we see.
Bilbo should've been the absolute focus of this trilogy, not the sideshow he ended up as. When he's on the screen, you're actually interested. No one cares about Bard's family or about Laketown politics. The tacked on romance between Tauriel and Kili never felt organic nor fit the universe. All of it failed to generate pretty much any emotional resonance in me. The stuff works only insofar that it keeps your attention if watched in a cinema but that's as far as it goes. The serious ponderings about greed and so on don't hold much weight because we aren't really invested in the characters.
The visuals were a bit better than in the previous two, it didn't felt as saturated or dipped so wholly in CGI paint, maybe they had more time now that they didn't have to invest as much effort on Smaug? In spite of the improvement, the movie still looked too much like a video game and the way Peter Jackson swirls and twirls the camera around really highlighted the fakeness of it all at times. At times the whole thing completely breaks down in scenes like when Thranduil gets four orcs trapped on his elk's antlers and then does a quad-beheading or when Legolas is running up a set of boulders that are dropping through the air. This is not light-hearted but over the top silly slapstick and well, it just doesn't work for me. The tone wanders too much from serious to utter schlock. The trilogy should've had more more funny and lighthearted moments like the ones in the original trilogy. Moments like Merri and Pippin comparing their heights after drinking the water of Fangorn and Legolas and Gimli's drinking competition and general banter. That stuff worked. Here we have the cowardly Alfrid in a woman's dress stuffing his chest with money and making it look like he has huge boobs. That's just way too much and not funny at all, he's almost like the Jar Jar Binks of this trilogy.
Also, what's up with the alternate Galadriel look in this film (the same that was in the Fellowship)? I thought that was like an evil version of her that would come about if she would get the one ring and succumb under its corruption instead of what she looks like when she does magic things. I'll just keep to that original idea, I think it works better. Galadriel carrying Gandalf really weirded me out also. Does she work out a lot or something? For me the elves are all about skill and graceful finesse and stuff like that. These kind of oddities and inconsistencies are so numerous with these films that I could probably go on for hours about these.
The thing is, pretty much everyone who went to watch these Hobbit movies saw the original trilogy which established what Middle Earth looked and felt like. If you're going to use a similar visual style you pretty much have to adhere to the tone and rules of the original or otherwise everyone's going to be constantly having this jarring feeling that everything's not right. The ring wraiths for example reminded me more of Final Fantasy or something like that and not the original. In the original the magic was more subtle and subdued, not banging around like in this one. It felt like my imagination was completely shut off by this film. The eagles were also really used as a deus ex machina in this, I didn't think they would risk such a dangerous frontal attack? I get it that they took part in the battle in the book but the way they portrayed it in this? I don't know. In the Return of the King I thought they were done really well as they fought the Fellbeasts in their element high up in the air but here they're bashing through army formations like it's no big deal.
Time will not treat these Hobbit movies kindly, no one is going to sit down and watch the extended editions of these at one sitting unlike with the original trilogy. What a shame. It's entertaining at parts in a pop-corn-movie sort of way but again there's too much stuff that continuously keeps chipping at your enjoyment. Not really sure the pop-corn-flick style really fits in well with Middle Earth either. Oh, it would've also been nice to know what actually happened to that gold, I thought it was sort of central in the movie? I guess that's reserved for the director's cut. Anti-greed indeed.