The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies
Let us hope that the Tolkien estate will make Jackson’s final installment of The Hobbit the last on he’ll do. What he did to the Hobbit book is a complete sham. A sham almost too great that it has taken the sheen off of what he did with the Lord of the Rings. This trilogy will be on par with George Lucas’s Star Wars prequels. A mistake that tarnished the entire enterprise.
Now that you know how I feel about the trilogy, this particular installment of the Hobbit wasn’t half bad. It was one which Jackson has to craft from whole himself because in the book the battle of five armies was done offscreen. Bilbo was in it for a few paragraphs until he got knocked out before witnessing the arrival of the Eagles. There was no were-worms or trolls with missile launchers on their back. There was no Scottish Dain from the Iron Hills on a boar nor Legolas riding a giant troll. There was no Bard from Laketown fighting it out in the ruins of Dale nor Thranduil and his elk tramping on orcs. In the book, it was just Bilbo looking for help from the skies before a rock crashed into his head knocking him out of the fight. That wouldn’t do for Jackson. He had to make the rest of it up. Without any of this, the Hobbit would have been done in one film.
When the movie opens, we find ourselves in the middle of Smaug’s rampage on Laketown. We dive right into it giving us the feeling of walking into the middle of a movie. This is what happens when you try to stretch it out. Then it seems the battle of five armies starts immediately afterwards. This installment felt shorter than the others. Finally it ends with Bilbo back at Bag End. Back at whom this story was about. Jackson muffs it because he forgot that this is Bilbo’s tale and not a tale of the waning days of the Third Age. If he only left it as the story of Bilbo, Jackson would’ve made a better movie. No need to know of the White Council or the battle with the Necromancer in Mirkwood. And we wouldn’t need those Orcs.
This one, I actually liked though.
3 of 5 stars.
