Wraps Up Nicely!

Rating: 10/10 (16 December 2014)

I went to a Hobbit marathon and witnessed the awesomeness of the entire story in one go. This last part of the story is the shortest. I'm a fan of the book and The movie does stick to the main story of the book fairly well. It was nice to know who was going to die in advance so I didn't become too attached to them, but could have easily done so with the awesome cast. While the whole necromancer part is not directly in the Hobbit book, it does tie the Hobbit to the LOTR creating a better story. I'm not one of the people who complains about added information. I love it.
***Spoilers***
The show starts right where it left off with no recap. Smaug is about to destroy Laketown. There is chaos and much destruction... The scenes were short, but to the point. I didn't feel that anything was cut short. There are a lot of loose ends going into this movie and this movie does a good job of completing things. There are a lot of hints into the LOTR story. Legolas does some of the same moves we saw in the trilogy. It was kind of like getting extra doses of "Hey, did you see that...." geekiness. I felt like the battle between Thorin and the Azog could have been done differently, but it's mostly artistic license as Tolkien himself did not elaborate on it. Several people have complained that Thorin has taken over as the main character where it should be Bilbo. I think they forget that this story is Bilbo's retelling of things as he saw them. He isn't going to focus on himself for the entire thing or it would have been quite boring. Not to mention that he gets knocked unconscious for a long while in the book and when he comes to everything has ended. Had Peter Jackson taken that route we would have seen nothing. The scenes were beautiful and haunting and once again the music was amazing. I loved this movie and will probably see it again in theaters. I saw it in IMAX 3D and thoroughly enjoyed every minute.