Thursday, December 18, 2014

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)

We come to it at least people. All the other Lord of the Ring films, live action and animated are seen and reviewed, and many other planned reviews are finished, now let's finish this at long last with my 600th review; The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.

Plot: After their encounter with Smaug, the Dwarves and Bilbo finally have Erebor in their possession along with all its gold. But then the people of Laketown who have just survived an attack from Smaug become allies with the Elves of Mirkwood and demand that the Dwarves give them the gold that they were promised. But Thorin who becomes infected with Dragon sickness refuses to give up any of his gold. Meanwhile, Gandalf arrives to warn everyone that an army of Orcs have come to claim the mountain. So the fight is one to defend the mountain and to finally stop Azog the Defiler and his forces once and for all.

Straight off the bat, I was very satisfied with this movie. Sure it's still no Lord of the Rings, but it was still a very epic, funny, action packed journey in Middle-Earth that brought the story of Bilbo and the dwarves to a very satisfying conclusion. The acting was great, most notably with Martin Freeman as Bilbo, giving use great reactions while also delivering some really dramatic moments. I really enjoyed how conflicted Thorin was with the dragon sickness while still giving some moments that showed that he still is the person that has been leading this company this whole time. I also liked Billy Connolly as Dáin. If you know a fair about that actor, than you should expect him to be as entertaining as possible with the role. I also liked the realtionship between Kili and Tauriel a lot more than I did in the second movie. While I've come to better terms with their romance even before I went to see this movie, I found their love to be more believable here. True, we don't get moments with them a whole lot either, but for the most part, it still works. But above all, I enjoyed the actual battle of the five armies. Complain all you want about how some things where not in the book like the giant earth worms, bats, and these different kind of trolls, but it made for a very long, yet very entertaining giant battle. It lived up to being a battle with multiple armies... even if there are more than one set of creatures in the case of the Orc armies which sort of makes it confusing with how it's supposed to be five armies. But what drives this movie more are the one on one (or two) duels between Thorin and his Dwarves and Azog and Bolg. They were exciting, thrilling, and one could make the argument that it really helped that there was almost no music during their fighting, they just let the scenes play would on their own. And the Necromancer fight with Gandalf, Saruman, Galadriel and Elrond was a ton if fun to watch. And the song at the end credits, "The Last Goodbye" played by Billy Boyd, the guy who played Pippin in The Lord of the Rings, is just a great song to finish the trilogy with. Now with all this praise, there surprisingly are a number of critics who didn't like this movie. Either they disliked it because they kept noticing the CGI, or they just complained that it wasn't Lord of the Rings-like enough. I would agree that the CGI is more noticeable in this film than it was in the other two, but I personally don't mind it. It still was giving me a massive battle with these giant landmarks of Middle-Earth that are great to look at. As for it not being Lord of the Rings-like enough...well...that's just dumb. As many of people have stated before an apparently I should do also if people are still saying that, this shouldn't be something that has to be compared to The Lord of the Rings. It's the same world, it has some of the same action and characters, and in fairness, the Battle of the Five Armies is in some respects the closest thing The Hobbit will have to a big battle like the events of The Lord of the Rings films. But it's still NOT The Lord of the Rings. It's not supposed to be Lord of the Rings, and it shouldn't entirely have to be Lord of the Rings. I understand how it's a bummer that these films aren't giant masterpieces of cinema like the previous trilogy, but that is not a good enough excuse to automatically hate them, especially when, despite their flaws, they're still gives us great action, great characters, and so many different things about the creatures and places of J.R.R. Tolkein's brilliant world of Middle-Earth.

And that's my review for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. It may have it's flaws just like the first two films, but in the long run, it was a great final Hobbit film with great use of the characters, great action, new creatures, new parts of the lore of Middle-Earth that give the trilogy a satisfying conclusion. I'm glad with what they gave us for the last film, and I look forward to one day own the whole trilogy. So guys, that's 600 reviews. Thank you for reading, I hope you will continue to enjoy this blog, and here's to hopefully reviewing 100 more movies in the future.  

Rating: 90%

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