The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies and an Underwhelming Farewell to Middle Earth

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.  The Lord of the Rings just did it much better.

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.  The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies is a sad ending to otherwise massive filmmaking achievement on Peter Jackson’s part.  It’s just sad that these films have to go out like this, with everybody in the film so fatigued and discombobulated by the end; they all look like they just want their last paychecks so they can leave New Zealand, go home and sleep for 10 days.