Review of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) by Nicholasbert — 12 Jan 2015

The worst episode in an already appalling trilogy, The Battle of the Five Armies finally erases any doubts on the cashgrab nature of The Hobbit franchise, filling two and a half hours with action scenes and mindless dialogue, and tonnes, tonnes upon tonnes of CGI. I don't think there is one consecutive minute of this film which doesn't have CGI. What happened to The Lord of the Rings mentality, people say? It got corrupted, ironically in the same way Thorin gets corrupted in the movie; but unfortunately it doesn't redeem itself.

And let's talk more about the CGI. One would naively expect, since it's the primary feature of this movie, that it be at least done well. And it isn't: half of the scenes look completely fake - there is no desire anywhere to produce at least a technical masterpiece. The Return of the King was made with a third the budget and more than 10 years prior, but it's still technically better, from the costumes to the makeup to the scenery.

Now for the editing: especially at the beginning, there are several weird cuts to unrelated scenes, and it all results in a confusing storyline (not in the good sense, not in the Pulp Fiction sense), with the battle scenes lasting forever, to a point when, 90 minutes in, one finds theirselves asking "Are we done yet?" Moreover, they decided NOT to complete The Desolation of Smaug with its natural ending, that is the slaying of the dragon, but to drag it at the beginning of the third movie, I assume in an attempt to force people who liked the second to buy a ticket for the third to find out what happens to Smaug, with a cheap sit-com mentality.

The Battle of the Five Armies is a pain to watch, never wants to end, and if you were to take a nap during the middle of the film you wouldn't lose one single important element of plot. It's not epic, it's not funny, it's not beautiful, it's not anything positive really. The producers must feel ashamed, but don't say you weren't expecting this.