The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Review
We have made it to the last movie in the Middle Earth franchise with The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies. How does this movie compare to the others? Is it as bad as others say it is? Let’s get started!
The Good:
For me the best thing about this movie is that it delivers what the title and the trailers promised. The title of this movie is The Battle of the Five Armies, so that leads audiences to think this is about the battle of the five armies. That is very true here. The last hour of this movie is this big epic battle (with five armies), and it’s not short, it's big, long, and epic in scale. Some movies don’t live up the title, this is a movie that very much does. And with the action you get different types of action. When the dwarfs are fighting it’s a bit more hardcore. When Legolas and Tauriel fight it’s more graceful, and with them using bow and arrows it’s very different from axes and swords.
Another thing I appreciated about this movie is that it closes out The Hobbit trilogy rather well, I think it does that pretty well in my opinion. They conclude Bilbo and Thorin’s arc in a satisfying way. But it does have a lot of easter eggs and little nuggets to set up The Lord of the Rings. The final scene with Legolas very much sets up his adventure in The Fellowship of the Ring. And the final scene of this movie is the same scene where Bilbo and Gandalf reunite in The Fellowship of the Ring. All of that was handled very well and in some clever way. And it’s even more nice when some prequels give answers to questions we didn’t want, and this movie doesn’t do that.
I also appreciated the character moments in this movie. The big example of this is the relationship between Bilbo and Thorin, this very complicated relationship. Where you have Thorin being driven mad by all of this gold and this sickness that lies of the gold, the dragon sickness. And in a lot of ways is mirroring Gollum, not copying Gollum but certainly mirroring what Gollum was like in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. And Bilbo is just trying to see the good inside of Thorin, he wants to help Thorin. And it does come to a very satisfying conclusion in this movie.
Finally, this is a movie that does move fairly quickly from plot point to plot point. To the point where I was never bored with this movie. There’s plenty of action in this movie to keep you entertained from beginning to the end.
The Bad:
And like the issues with the other movies this movie does feel stretched out. Where in the book the battle of the five armies is a few pages long, but converted it into a movie. So there’s a bunch of filler that doesn’t need to be there, the battle as a whole just feels very stretched out and overly long. Where this movie is 2 hours and 24 minutes long, and the battle itself doesn’t start until a 1 hour and 11 minutes into the movie, that’s about half way through the movie until the title of the movie actually comes into play. And we spend much longer than we need to with Laketown citizens and the Alfred character that doesn’t need to be there. Like they have Alfred showing up through-out the movie, but all of those scenes could have been cut. It’s literally just filler to have this epic run time. Even the opening where you have Luke Evans’ character kill Smaug, that has no payoff to it. It even feels like a deleted scene from The Desolation of Smaug. The opening to this scene should have been the final scene in the previous movie. Even with that about 30 minutes of the way through the movie you have Gandalf, Radagast, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Christopher Lee having this fight in this abandoned castle thing that is just there to set up The Fellowship of the Ring. It didn’t need to be there, that could have cut. There are three scenes or sequences right off the head that could have been cut from the movie and wouldn’t have changed a thing. That is about 20-30 minutes worth of screen time that didn’t need to be there.
From there this movie just looks off, the visuals just don’t look up to par with the rest of the franchise. Even The Lord of the Rings movies look better than this movie. I don’t know if they didn’t have the budget or ran out of time but the visuals here are bad, there isn’t any other way around it. Like it’s obvious that all of these actors are standing on a green screen. There’s a scene where Legolas is fighting on a bridge that is collapsing and he’s jumping on pieces to get higher up so he doesn’t die. And it literally just looks like Orlando Bloom on a green screen.
Speaking of that, there are just some very cartoonish moments in this movie that don’t work. The bridge scene that I just mentioned being the prime example of that. Where on paper, I can see where they were going with that. I can see the idea that they had for the moment, but the way it’s portrayed in this movie looks really cheap. And feels like a moment out of a video game, that’s how weird it looks. You have the big giant orc creature things that fall to the ground, the way it does so is goofy. I chuckled a bit when that happened, and that makes some of the emotional weight of this battle just fall flat. Some of the moments don’t hit as well as they should, because there are far too many cartoonish moments.
Finally, the romance between Kili and Tauriel just falls flat. It’s very rushed and forced into The Desolation of Smaug and this movie. And they try to have some emotional weight with that in the finale, but it just falls flat. And it felt very tacked on, once again something that didn’t need to be there. And Tauriel was written for the movies, she wasn’t in the books at all. So it felt like Peter Jackson created this character and wrote a script for it. But forgot about Tauriel and didn’t give her anything to do, so he quickly wrote a romance for her. That’s what it feels like, I don’t know what actually happened.
Final Thoughts: This is a frustrating movie, this is a movie that you can see a much better version of this movie. Cut 20-30 minutes from the first act of this movie, instead having the battle start over an hour into the movie. Have it start within the first 30-40 minutes, that’s how much stuff can be cut from this movie. Sure, it does live up to the name of being the battle of the five armies. But this is a movie that is easily the most flawed film in this franchise, and left this franchise on a low note for me.
The Score: 7.5/10 (C)
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