Reviews

I was as irritated as most people when I heard that Peter Jackson would split The Hobbit into three movies because it was obviously a decision based on nothing more than getting as much money as possible, but even I never imagined that he would stoop to making a movie like Battle of the Five Armies (a.k.a. Battle of the 25 Armies plus a couple of random giant mountain goats and a pig thrown in for good measure).

The CGI was as bad as something you would see in a B movie—even worse than the previous two Hobbit films. But even more noticeably, the script took a dive to rock bottom. Within the first half hour, such utterly laughable clichés as "You make me feel alive," were spoken in a cheesy love scene that seemed like something straight out of Saturday Night Live, except that the audience was apparently supposed to take it seriously.

Shortly before the battle started, there were a few much-needed moments of comic relief, and I thought the film might possibly turn around. But all my illusions were soon shattered during the ten-minute scene where Thorin walks on top of the ice that Azog is floating under with his eyes open, following the orc and apparently waiting for him to break through it, when—surprise!—he does, and (spoiler for those who have not yet watched the ten-minute scene that made this obvious) kills Thorin. Alas. It might have been sad if I hadn't been waiting around for ten minutes knowing that he would get killed.

Things were looking grim for the dwarfs when who should appear? Our heroes the eagles, of course, who have managed to bail out the protagonists in every single movie of the trilogy.

Although I couldn't stop laughing during the scene where three dwarfs find completely random giant mountain goats with no riders in the middle of the battle and proceed to ride them up a mountain, the worst part of the movie was easily the ending. As if the movie isn't long enough, the audience is not only forced to watch Bilbo go all the way BACK to the Shire, they have to re-watch footage from Fellowship of the Ring! I knew it was a bad sign that Peter Jackson actually made a movie shorter than three hours (although it felt like six)—apparently, he had so little material for this movie that he had to re-use material from his original trilogy.

When Tauriel discusses love with the abominably clichéd line "Why does it hurt so much?" I think she described the feelings of most of the audience enduring the latest Hobbit movie.