Battle of the Five Armies is a soulless end to the flawed Hobbit trilogy

Ars' resident Tolkien nerd on Peter Jackson's problematic final chapter.

Read the whole story

 

[CraigJ ✅]

kranchammer[/url]":22s1nbna]It strikes me that these movies are the creation of a person with a genius for visual filmmaking that has lost or stopped listening to the voices that tell him that hey, maybe this is a bit over-the-top or maybe we should pay more attention to the story and less to paying WETA to make cool-looking shit.

It's the George Lucas syndrome - so successful that no one tells you no.

As far as movies go the Hobbit movies were OK. Compared to LOTR, they are major disappointments.

 

[CraigJ ✅]

ayejay_nz[/url]":23uzsw3q]I think most young kids will probably enjoy the movie and most people who read the book when they were younger and are now in their 20's + probably won't.

Is the target audience of the film, as was the novel, young kids?

At the end of the day a $90.6m five-day opening at the US box office says "keep making them like this".

All that crap on E! is popular too. 'Nuff said.

 

[CraigJ ✅]

Wickwick[/url]":1llzp8cy]

BigDragon[/url]":1llzp8cy]I saw this movie on Friday. It easily is the worst movie I've seen all year. They should not have killed wyvern Smaug as part of the title sequence. 5 to 10 minutes in and the most dynamic character on the screen is wiped out in a completely unbelievable fashion. From then on it's 2-hours worth of "How to Kill an Orc" and watching completely flat characters do the same thing over and over again. Seriously, I'm surprised they found so many different ways to slice and smash those orcs up.

This is me being disappointed. The Hobbit had so much more potential than this. The characters could have been made deep, properly brought to life, and a timeless story could have been realized. Instead we got stuck with action sequences so forced and drawn out that people just started pulling out their phones in the middle of the movie and never looked back. Someone should post the movie's script online. I bet you could read through all the dialogue in 10 to 15 minutes if you ignore the [fighting], [some more fighting], and [even more fighting] sections. So much potential wasted.

Unfortunately, Smaug dies right about where he's supposed to - and just the way it was written in the book (ok, I don't recall any "black arrow" stuff - just a regular arrow that finds the soft belly where a scale had fallen off). Then again it was one book not a trilogy and the final battle was only a few pages.

The resolution of the characters AFTER the main events was big in The Hobbit and LotR. None of that made the Hobbit trilogy and very little made the LotR movies either.

The black arrow was a possible magical arrow from the lonely mountain, and was passed down through generations. It was Bard's best and always recovered. Named for the black fletching I think. He saved it to use as the last arrow to fell Smaug.

"Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!"

To me this is a much better story that the stupid metal arrow fired the way it was in the movie...