A fitting end

Rating: 7/10 (19 January 2015)

Oh, Middle Earth. You and your orcs, elves, magic rings, and dragons that sound an awful lot like a certain detective I know from the BBC. It's sad to see you go but, after witnessing a decline in quality from your predecessor trilogy, maybe it was time. Yes, this is where the epic saga that has been Middle Earth, from its first epic fantasy masterpieces that were The Lord of the Rings, to the slightly less epic and slightly less masterpiecey Hobbit trilogy, ends. It also wraps up the greatest display of "how to turn a 300 page book into 9 hours worth of film" ever conceived.
It's been a long journey to get here, one that dragged on perhaps a little too long, but still delivered us quite the fantasy adventure. This is why The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies had a big duty to fulfill, and the trailers certainly made it their duty to promise us the most epicy of epic finales to the most epicy epic saga of epicness ever made. And you better bring the tissues too, 'cuz this one's gonna' bust out all the feels. Take THAT Tolkienites!
OK, all jokes aside, The Battle of the Five Armies is too much fun not to enjoy. Is it over-the-top? Yes. Do the epic dramatic moments sometimes come off way cheesier than intended? Yes. Does the CGI make you snicker every once in a while? Yes. But dammit if it's not the three hour long battle that you didn't know you needed but totally did need. You have a three hour movie here that is literally probably 80% killing stuff and 20% talking about what stuff is getting killed next.
The film opens with the Laketown battle against Smaug, which is then followed by the title card. Yeah, I hope you got your dragon fix in the second film because our scaly friend is offed within about ten minutes (sorry to spoil it for all twelve of you who thought the dragon would actually survive). What follows is the battle for the dwarven halls that Thorin and friends did all the work to reclaim just so everybody could then pop out of the woodwork claiming they deserve a piece of that pie. It's a battle that pits dwarfs, elves, and humans against a massive army of Mordor orcs and goblins who are bred for the sole purpose of killing stuff, but can also be killed by a bunch of farmers. I don't have enough fingers to plug all of this film's plot holes, but I don't want to spend time doing that either. I just want to see more heads chopped off.
A lot of people have criticized Peter Jackson for this Hobbit trilogy. Sure he turned a simple little fantasy adventure novel into a three picture cash cow, but in the 70+ years since this book was written Jackson has certainly brought it to life in the most exciting, spectacular, and accessible way ever. The grand scale of these novels and the world that Tolkien built is one of the greatest feats of literature of all time, and it deserved to be brought to celluloid in the biggest and flashiest way possible.
Yes there are a lot of liberties taken here, but that's why it's called an adaptation. Yes, some liberties are more sinful than others; the Kili/Tauriel love story is one of the dumbest things I can think of in this whole trilogy, and putting Legolas in was silly and unnecessary, and creating the character of Tauriel just because Evangeline Lily looks smokin' as a redhead also warrants a roll of the eyes. But at the end of the day I can only crap on this movie so much before I admit that I had a hell of a great time watching The Battle of the Five Armies.