Count me among the people who regret that The Hobbit films were stretched out into a trilogy. There is so much unnecessary filler and extra nonsense in these movies, and in The Battle of the Five Armies especially, that this third movie is all third act. There’s not enough material for The Battle of the Five Armies to stand on its own, with nearly everything – especially the emotional impact – tied to the first two films. And since an entire year has passed, none of that emotion or interest has carried over.

The Battle of the Five Armies is entertaining at the barest, baseline level, because it’s still a well-made film telling a story that I like. But The Hobbit trilogy has been stretched too thin, like butter  scraped over too much bread.

Movie Review: 5/10 – Alright.

I suppose in one long, 9-hour viewing, The Hobbit as a whole might be a good movie. But who has the time or energy to watch that sort of thing? Who could have the desire? I’ve never read any of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s original works, so I don’t speak from a literary perspective. As a movie-goer, as someone who loves The Lord of the Rings movies deeply, I feel that The Hobbit was just too jammed up with nonsense. Fights were long, characters were uninteresting, story arcs were uninspired, and nothing hit with the same impact as The Lord of the Rings. Director Peter Jackson tried to make too much out of too little, simple as that.

Personally, I’m more than willing to blame the studio, which probably pushed for the trilogy in order to make more money. Cynical things like that definitely happen. And I suppose Jackson and his team of writers, actors and producers did their best to make this trilogy work. But The Battle of the Five Armies is a slog. They don’t even try to make it it’s own movie.

Join me after the jump for the full review! There will be SPOILERS from The Battle of the Five Armies!

This stilted, emotionless storytelling was obvious from the first 10 minutes of the movie – with everything else pretty downhill from there. In my review of the second film, The Desolation of Smaug, I was very upset at the abrupt cliffhanger ending. Bilbo Baggins and his dwarf allies fail to slay the dragon Smaug, so he flies off to nearby Laketown to kill everybody. We’d spent the whole second half of the movie getting to know the fine folks of Laketown and the wicked evil of Smaug. The villain was larger than life in our eyes – only for the movie to end abruptly with the final confrontation yet to come. At the time, I figured this would be OK, because I knew the third film was only a year away.

But here’s the thing: Smaug is killed within the first 10 minutes of The Battle of the Five Armies, and then he’s never mentioned again.

And I’m sure they paid Benedict Cumberbatch a cumberbatch of money

Why not tack those 10 minutes onto the end of The Desolation of Smaug and save us from that terrible cliffhanger?! The first 10-20 minutes of The Battle of the Five Armies is nothing but climax and epilogue for The Desolation of Smaug! It’s maddening! It’s frustrating! Why not cut some time off that stupid barrel ride in the middle of Desolation and add this proper climax? It would have worked so much better!

Because at the start of Five Armies, we no longer care about Smaug. It’s been a whole year. All the menace and evil and immediacy built up in Smaug in the last movie is gone this time around. He doesn’t matter anymore. He’s an after thought left dangling from the last movie, and like I said, he’s cleaned up in 10 minutes. Smaug gets one monologue and then he’s killed exactly how we knew he was going to be killed, by Bard the Bowman’s black arrow.

I cannot tell you how much this bothered me. The defeat of Smaug adds nothing to The Battle of the Five Armies, but it would have added everything to The Desolation of Smaug! This was just very poor planning and execution.

Kind of like everything the dwarves have done so far

But the thing is, the rest of Five Armies is exactly the same. No effort is made to build this into its own movie. All of the emotion and character investment is carried over from the second film, and since all this time has passed, none of it matters all that much anymore.

In The Battle of the Five Armies, Thorin Oakenshield and his dwarf companions have successfully re-captured their old kingdom and driven out Smaug. Their quest is complete, and all of Smaug’s richest now belong to them. But the men of Laketown and the elves of the forest show up demanding their cut of the riches, so Thorin and company must dig in and defend their home and their treasure.

The Lord of the Rings was about saving the world. The Hobbit is about getting your hands on a big pile of gold. Suffice to say, the dramatic stakes are not the same…

“I love gooooold!”

To a large extent, this is Thorin’s movie. He’s the only character who actually changes during the course of the movie. At the start of the film, he’s going mad due to his obsession with protecting what now belongs to him, because gold changes people. All of the other dwarves are pushed to the side because none of them are willing to stand up to Thorin and tell him that he’s going mad, even though it’s obvious to all of them. All they can do is grouse and grumble and follow his increasingly insane orders. That was annoying. Most of these dwarves were pretty cool in the first two movies, but none of them matter anymore.

Nor does Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit. He’s also pushed to the side due to Thorin’s madness, but at least he gets the honor of standing up to Thorin at one point and calling him on his madness. But that doesn’t get him anywhere. Thorin doesn’t listen. I don’t think Bilbo actually accomplishes anything in this movie.

He knows what I’m talking about!

Bilbo may get a great moment where he stands up against the mad Thorin, but in the end, its Thorin himself who simply overcomes his madness. There’s a brief scene in the middle of the movie where Thorin just kind of wanders around alone for awhile, ruminating on what everybody has said, and then he just gets over his madness. Just like that. There are no emotional stakes in his recovery. It’s not his friendship with Bilbo that snaps him out of it. It’s not the loyalty of his dwarven kin. Thorin just thinks really hard about it on his own and – poof – he’s saved! Then the dwarves instantly forgive him.

And that’s a problem, because Thorin starts out the movie as a total asshole unworthy of redemption. He’s going mad for reasons that are plainly obvious to everyone, including the audience, and deeply selfish. So I sat there in the theater wanting one of the actually likable heroes to just smack Thorin upside the head. Thorin is incredibly unlikable throughout most of the movie, and by the time his big emotional change comes along, I just didn’t care anymore. I am not a stubborn dwarf, I didn’t swear a loyalty oath to Thorin, and any emotional attachment I had to him from the first two movies was wiped away in the past year. Now I’m just watching this aggravating asshole dwarf start a war due to his madness, only for him to just snap out of it on his own and be forgiven by everybody.

How many CGI people are dead now because you had to be an asshole, Thorin?!

Oakenshield then goes on to have an over-long fight with that bad guy orc who has been lurking around the fringes of these three movies without any real storyline of his own.

But at least he’s got lots of friends!

Those are some of my biggest individual complaints, but overall, the whole movie is just one bland continuation of what came before. The big battle between the five armies kicks off early into the movie and never lets up. There are no dramatic moments in the battle, nothing to rival The Lord of the Rings. It’s just big CGI armies smashing and killing, while a few named characters get a scene or two of dialogue. Sometimes some characters get some one-on-one fights, and occasionally you’ll see one of the heroes slaying his or her enemies with some impressive fight/dance choreography, but it’s all largely just vague CGI fighting.

The Battle of the Five Armies is not its own movie. It’s the big, climactic fight scene of The Hobbit trilogy as a whole, and that’s disappointing, despite being a well-made fight scene. None of the characters get story arcs that matter, and even big named characters like Bilbo Baggins, Legolas and Gandalf just kind of hang out in the sidelines, largely ineffectual to the overall story or action. Jackson tries to wring some emotion out of his movie with some character deaths, but we had to wait a whole year since those characters were relevant, so their deaths feel like mere after thoughts here at the end.

Not her, but what was the point of her?

The Hobbit trilogy, as a whole, isn’t so bad. I’ve generally enjoyed all of the films. But in the end, it’s an over-long, bloated, pale imitation of the originally Tolkien trilogy. Whoever decided to stretch these movies into three films made a monumentally bad decision. Granted, they’ll probably make more money, but who cares about money?

Oh right, that one character, Alfred, cared about money. That stupid Grima Wormtongue wannabe who just kept popping up in The Battle of the Five Armies again and again. Why didn’t anybody put him out of his (and our) misery? Why did Bard keep trusting him? The character had no story arc, no redemption, no reason for existing other than to pad out the movie.

So I guess he’s kind of emblematic of The Battle of the Five Armies itself.

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