by Christopher Barr │POSTED ON DECEMBER 27, 2014
The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies is a mess of a film
no matter how much you wish it wasn’t. It’s a disappointing end to a
long, oh so very long journey to J.R.R Tolkien’s middle earth through the
camera lens of Peter Jackson. Five
Armies follows Bilbo Baggins, still possession of the Ring, and his dwarf companions to a massive battle
at the end between dwarfs, elves, man and all matter of monsters and Orcs.
The plot of the movie becomes lost in the CGI overload
and the choppy editing. By the time the movie is over, you don’t even know
where you are and how you got there. The final battle is characterless;
it’s a confusing series of shots that are usually synonymous with the ending of
one of Michael Bay’s Transformers
movies. There is so much going on that you can’t keep up with it.
Suddenly a character you forgot about twenty minutes ago reappears and you are
expected to suddenly care about what’s happening to them.
The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are a series of epic fantasy
films based of the writings of J.R.R Tolkien. Both sets of stories take place
in Middle Earth, a land with Elves, Dwarfs and Hobbits as well as Orcs, a
Gollum and the evil Ringwraiths also known as the Nazgûl, battle each over the
forces of good and evil. This world is filled with details like elaborate
languages and multi-generation anthropological customs. At their heart
the stories are about good versus evil, overcoming the odds and looking in the
face of courage while having the sudden strength to stare back at it.
That’s the real problem between The Hobbit Trilogy and The
Lord of the Rings Trilogy; we cared about Frodo, Sam and Aragorn at the end
of The Return of the King, we knew
what they were doing, we knew what the stakes were. With The Hobbit, we were smothered to death,
to such a point that we became desensitized to bother caring.
The fight scenes were boring this time around.
The Orcs didn’t look nearly as terrifying, and the massive use of CGI in these
epic scenes dulled the pallet, it made the battles weightless. The
Uruk-Hai from The Two Towers were scary creatures that possessed weight in
their world, where the big bad in The
Hobbit, Azog The Defiler was a CGI mess that looked cartoonish.
Because of the poorly realized action sequences and
accidental comedy there is no tension, and with no tension and poorly developed
characters, you simply no longer care about who lives and who dies. The
interchangeable dwarfs are forgettable, Legolas is boring and dull, and the
mild connections between the characters drift away by the time you reach for
another hand full of popcorn.
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