More appreciated the second time around

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2014)

I really like Mr. Winslow's lead comments, they pretty much sum it up for me. In retrospect The Hobbit only had two feature length movies in it (at MOST), fortunately a lot of the meat of the real story was left for this finale. I thought a lot about this - this is the tell: in the Lord of the Rings movies there were extended battle sequences but not extended personal battle sequences, which sort of exposes the attempt to fill the time; I found some of these personal battles tedious. In the LOTR movies the problem was cramming all of the material into the allotted time. Here it's the opposite (less so here than in the earlier Hobbits), so we see too many individual fight sequences which last too damn long. On the plus side the battle at Dol Guldur was excellent even though it wasn't set up very well. Dain of the dwarfs was great and Thranduil as king of the Woodelves very interesting. But the source material just isn't up to the LOTR and Jackson couldn't make up the difference. All that said, this is an impressive production and easily the best of the Hobbits, it's just that I'm such a Tolkein nut I won't live easily with less than perfection. I have to say I liked it considerably more the second time around than the first - in the first viewing I was comparing it to how I would have run the story, in the second I took it more on its terms. The Silmarilion is their last shot with that great author, we'll see if they go there.