Truly Dreadful

Rating: 1/10 (12 May 2014)

I am a big fan of LOTR and whilst I thought AUJ was poor, I was willing to let that one go as a blip. With that in mind I had high hopes for TDOS which appeared from the trailer to be darker and grittier that the first instalment.
Unfortunately, what was presented was an absolute shambles. The plot is truly terrible and a mere shadow of the original book; the HFR 3D serves to visualise most of the film as a cheap, made-for-TV soap opera; there is virtually no character development and the CGI fight scenes are so bad it's just laughable.
In AUJ I found HFR 3D passable. It didn't distract me too much and maybe even enhanced parts of the film. However, in this instalment it was awful. The very first scene is almost unwatchable it's so bad and this is a theme that continues throughout most of the film. The character closeups are like watching a badly made TV show with all the limitations of costume and make-up clearly visible and the large-scale CGI scenes are like watching a computer game intro sequence. It just does not work.
The plot is only loosely based on the book. The great character of Beorn is just glossed over and the gorgeous Murk Wood is presented as a mere triviality. I was looking forward to a sinister spider scene but all that we got was some Disney-style nonsense that was not in the least bit scary.
The entire thing is conducted as if a child has written it... "...and then the dwarfs go into beorn's house and then beorn tries to kill them and then he's not bothered and then he hates them and then he doesn't and then we're bored of beorn and then they go to murk wood and then gandalf goes to find the necromancer and we don't really know what that is or why but just cos and then there are spiders and then the dwarfs are stuck in the webs and then they're not stuck anymore and then they box the spiders and win and then some really really good looking elves come along and one of them is legolas and he's not really a wood elf but we'll just pretend he is cos he's really really good looking and the other elf girl who's really really good looking gets the hots for one of the dwarfs erm yeah erm hmm and that probably seems a bit weird so then the dwarf tells her a story about the moon and then and then..."
And now for the the fight scenes. Oh my god. Please just stop it. Please. If I see Legolas surfing around like some deranged beach bum with a bow and arrow one more time I think I'll throw up in the theatre. "Pathetic" doesn't even begin to describe the nonsense that is on display here.
And why, when PJ or GDT or whoever started saying "... and then the dwarfs bait Smaug into lighting the furnaces and then hundreds of tons of solid gold melts in a few seconds and then the gold is made into a giant gold dwarf and then the giant gold dwarf splurges all over Smaug and then that's pointless anyway cos Smaug just shakes it off and then Smaug doesn't want to kill the dwarfs anymore just cos and then Smaug just flies off instead..." did someone not just stand up and slap whoever it was very hard in the face and say: "No. In then name of Gondor, I will not let you defile the work of the great Tolkien such"?