The best of the bunch but I'm looking forward to the next instalment

Rating: 8/10 (9 February 2015)

Possibly perversely I enjoyed this instalment - but is that only because it's probably the last? I've more or less enjoyed all of Peter Jackson's extremely condensed Tolkien heavily-edited interpretations, usually less and none of them have inspired me to read the books. All of the films kept a lot of people in work, creative people and the banks happy and audiences mesmerised so in a sense it's a shame it has to end – couldn't they squeeze a quadrilogy of The Simarillion to keep the gravy train rolling?
It opens with a fiery flying monster getting his violent come-uppance amidst relentless carnage above Lake-town; then the title. I thought Smaug the magic dragon was a fantastic character, gone too soon. Then began the main carnage with a mix of rumbustious racism and feeble posturing from a motley assemblage of concrete stereotypes (the most glaring still being that perceived Ugliness equals Evil and so-called Betters have Brains). But if War Is Hell no one in here was to blame - the hundreds of men women and children who got themselves slaughtered in this film may have been consoled by that thought but I wasn't. I tend to mentally switch off during modern cgi cartoonery battle sequences but I would've missed most of this film if I had; and apparently it took up only one chapter of the original book. As with the five other films I wondered idly about the ancient hordes of workers, peasants and slaves that would have been required to build such mammoth cities and buildings – no one in the current Middle Earth seemed to be involved in creating anything, even food or clothes. As politicians and terrorists have always found it's easier to destroy than create, so film-makers always find viewers are more entranced by destruction (as a form of creation) than construction. It was nice to see oldë Christopher Lee kicking such violent ass, strange to glimpse giant worms used merely as plot-device escapees from Dune, weird to wonder of the true significance of the Arkenstone in the book as there was none in the film. However, it's a film of tremendous imagination and scope, small plot holes and non sequiturs are entirely understandable and forgivable.
Too many damn people died in here for me to care about any of the important characters who croaked, although even I would have been surprised if the littlest hobo hero had met his doom too. Overall, I'm still determined to never read the books but all being well I'll spend a week on a LOTR&H Fest sometime, with Part 7 being a night of silence - it might just make more sense to me if seen with the others in context, and before I've a chance to forget all that went before. We shall not see its like again, hopefully: the poignant end credit marathon sings it all.