As I told my brother after he bought Culture Club’s “Color by Numbers” album, you just forfeited all rights to criticism for the remainder of your natural life. Subjective opinions truly can be wrong and this one is a shining example of that truth.
Taking my 7yo son to see the movie here in an hour. I’m sure he’ll love it.
Ive liked all of the Tolkien adaptations of Jackson. Ive understood that adapting the books and pleasing everyone was always going to be impossible. Reading is far too subjective and every individual that reads a book takes something different from it and has a different vision of what it should be. This was Jackson’s vision and I accepted that. All that aside, I found The 5 Armies to be the least enjoyable of the 6. It was mostly due to pacing. The story was jarring and lacked fluidity. It was a visually impressive movie and there were many good parts but things just didn’t seems to flow together well. Maybe watching the movies marathon style would help.
That’s how you know it’s real.
They are similar though, in the way that both creators, Jackson or Tolkien are particularly great at doing one specific thing, and that is world building, but not perfect storytelling. They both are imperfect at telling their stories. Jackson is bad at pacing his stories and is a bit fanboyish, and Tolkien is bad at turning his deep and epic world into a good novel. Like, they both have high ambitions for their works, but they can’t 100% translate to their medium (film or book) perfectly.
I read the hobbit about 16 years ago. I don’t remember much, I remember it was hard to read.
Like, I greatly prefer learning about Middle Earth like I like reading history books of great wars. Tolkien is bad at the minutiae of the dialogue and character, but great at making a deep fantasy world. I think that Jackson is somewhat similar in that way.
The Hobbit is actually a pretty easy read. It’s not at all Epic on the same scale as LOTR. I am waiting for a few others to tell me what they think two. I will probably wind up with some special edition of the six extended movies together, eventually. I do enjoy them, but I really think the movies would have been better as two. Dain was a bit of silly fun.
Spoiler
Deaths seemed a bit anti-climatic for me though for such important characters
I just returned from seeing it, in 3d. For someone who isnt a Jackson fan, the movie is what I thought it was going to be for me, painful.
I was hoping to get some enjoyment from the fight scenes but they were so ridiculously over the top I found myself laughing at how goofy they were. Why cant modern directors even try to make action scenes plausable? Any suspension of disbelief I forced onto myself was lost every encounter.
Dont even get me started on how torturous it was to sit through 20+ mins of goofy looking cgi over the top action movie previews (furious7, madmax, and a few other forgettable drivel). 20 mins if previews. WTFF? Yet another reason not to go to the theater.
The Hobbit really isn’t hard to read - I think you may be confusing your experience with some other books from your posts?
The Hobbit and LotR have very different tones and stories. One is an (the first?) epic fantasy with a fully fleshed out mythology and history, the other is a svelte and timeless children’s novel.
You said the two were broadly the same when they couldn’t be more different, apart from sharing the same world and a few characters.
I haven’t read either in 10 years, but I would say that both LOTR and the Hobbit are difficult to read for the era they were written.
I really liked this one. It didn’t feel dragged out like the first two. I was annoyed one villain got away scot-free.
I didn’t care for this one at all. The pacing just felt off. Oddly, for an almost two and a half hour movie, it seemed really rushed in some spots.
Alfrid
What the fuck? This guy? Peter Jackson for some reason had a real hard-on for this character. Ha ha. We get it Peter. He’s a slimy lickspittle that’s a coward and greedy. I think we all had enough of this guy in the last movie. Did we really need so much time taken for him? Also, he gets away??
I left the theater vaguely disappointed. The best part of the movie for me was Saruman kicking all kinds of ass.
Also, what happened to that battlewagon scene from the preview?
Haven’t seen any of the trailers. Maybe it’s from the battle between dwarves and elves that was cut from the movie? Will show up in the Extended Edition.
I watched and thought it was better than the second movie, but then again that’s not exactly a high barrier one needed to jump over.
impressons
[spoiler]I liked Armitage’s delivery, but I thought Thorin’s heel-turn was too quick and sudden. Given how long the trilogy is you’d think they could have spent a bit more time on that instead of lets say the bloody river scene in the second movie. Same for his ‘epiphany’. I also liked Freeman’s Bilbo, but it seemed like he was 5 minutes in the movie, the ending aside. Ken Stott’s Balin was wonderful, too.
The rest of the dwarves completely lacked profile, even the ones that got some more screentime and lines. Having seen three movies, I still couldn’t really tell you what kind of personality Kili has. Ah, the dwarves. I guess they wanted to give each of them a very distinctive look, but in some cases I thought the result was utterly ridiculous or looked as if it belonged into some other universe, e.g. Bombur or the guy who apparently stood to close to an hairspray explosion. Funnily enough, they went to heavy on prosthetics for everyone else that Kili again looked ‘unnaturally normal’.
Galadriel, Elrond and Saruman freeing Gandalf - Jesus, what was up with that scene? Very confusing part overall and it ended somewhat ludicrous with Sauron’s eye showing up and projecting the nazguls as if he was giving them a goddamn Powerpoint presentation of what’s to come.
The Laketown scene? Should have been in the second movie instead of the cliffhanger. I guess this actually purely came down to logistics rather than PJ or Warner Bros. decided to simply cut it and add it to the third. WETA spent a huge amount of time to get the scene done - far more time compared to the titular battle that is supposed the climax of the third movie.
I thought the score was overall rather weak. No real kick-ass moment. The only parts that really worked were based on themes already established in LotR, e.g. the ring tempting Bilbo.
The battle itself was ok and a mess at the same time, but it’s hard to impress given the battles we’ve already seen in The Two Towers and Return of the King. BotF armies felt like a mix of Helm’s Deep and Gondor (city breach). Given that most of the humans were poor fishermen, it’s really hard to see how they would last even three seconds against well armed/trained orcs. And they really turned up the Looney Tunes parts up to eleven, and I’m not even talking about the poorly animated Legolas stuff. When Bard jumped on the wagon to kill that troll, pretty everyone I was with was slightly groaning. And some of the troll designs really had written all over them: “We need something completely crazy even if it doesn’t make sense at all.”
It was really hard to follow what was going on and how the situation was. How close were the orcs to reaching the big hall? Where in the city was the big hall? What was really going on on the battlefield as we see Thorin et al fight Azog? Once the movie was over, someone asked: “Where was the fifth army?” Yeah, they were kinda at the top of the mountain? But did the main force also head to the battlefield? It seemed like the dwarves were already heavily outnumbered by Azog’s army. I had a much better idea of Helm’s Deep’s or Gondor’s topology.
I actually liked the setup/location for the fight between Azog and Thorin, and I thought it would have been a wonderful ending if Thorin (mortally wounded) kills off Azog by throwing the heavy stone to have him slide off the ice. But nope, there still had to be the gotcha-scene in which Azog shows up again for the stabby-stab.
Alfrid: What a waste of time. Apparently, the general audience liked him as comic relief though which is why he was featured so promimently.
Also, PJ really went George Lucas on this one. There are so many scenes that could have easily done with practical sets, props and real actors in a much shorter time, e.g. Gandalf walking away after parting from Bilbo in the end. Nope, was done in CG and probably ended up costing more and putting even more load on a studio that already had a hard time finishing the battle sequences. (Some parts really were as poorly animated as they are due to lack of time.)
Question to those in the know: Thranduil hinting at Strider/Aragorn - shoe-horned LotR reference aside, does that even make sense in the timelime of the books?[/spoiler]
Yup, like everyone else, I found Thorin’s “arc” in this movie didn’t work at all.
dragon sickness
Did we really need Thorin to turn into Howard Hughes? His “dragon sickness” was just too over-the-top. One minute, he’s leading the dwarves to drive Smaug out of the mountain, the next he’s brooding and mumbling in the hoard ready to kill people over imagined treachery. I think there’s something wrong when Thorin’s turn and redemption is more believable in the book.
I did like Billy Connolly as Dain.
Also, now that I’m mulling it over, where did the armored rams come from? They’re in the trailer, and we see Thorin, Fili and Kili using them to attack Azog’s position, but we didn’t actually see them used by Dain’s forces.
What’s funny about Dain is that I immediatly noticed that the character is complete CG while a friend of mine, an actual animator, didn’t it.
Yeah, there’s a lot to hate in this movie but I agree with others that the dragon sickness is probably the most egregious sin.
‘Dragon sickness again’
The literal interpretation of dragon sickness is a real problem. Is it not enough to say that dwarves, like dragons, tend to be greedy and that this lust for riches sometimes clouds their judgement? This is a compelling story of human (dwarven) failability. The choice to interpret dragon sickness as a magical enchantment bewitching Thorin completely undermines his story arc. There’s no growth or character development because he was never culpable. It’s emblematic of Jackon’s tendency in this trilogy to dial everything up to the point where the human scale of events is lost and the viewer disengages.
One question – Do I recall correctly from the books that Bard only knows about Smaug’s missing scale because Bilbo discovered it when treating with the dragon? Changing that once again diminishes Bilbo’s contributions. (See also the troll scene from the first movie.)
In the book the thrush relays the info to Bard.
Talking birds? That’s just crazy!
I would agree that its part of Jackson’s unmistakable tendency to make poor choices in this trilogy, in part based upon the noise. Although I spent my previous post mostly bagging on the movie, there is a lot to like in and about these movies: It just gets lost in trying to give the audience more of what was popular in LotR and the studio more return on its dollar (often at the same time) at the expense of the script, or the characters, or the moment.
Its the very definition of sequel-itis, except its in a prequel. I mean, for example I dislike every “ride” sequence: The barrels, Goblintown, golden Smaug, etc. That isn’t Peter Jackson trying to ruin the Hobbit, that’s him to make a thrilling action sequence in service of his movie. He does the same thing in Fellowship, though, by having Aragorn and Frodo ride the falling stair down in Moria. All of those set pieces in the Hobbit fall flat with me, in their contrivance. I was scared going into the 5 Armies that you would have of couple of Thorin’s company playing steel drums on rows of orc heads on the battlefield.
These movies are, to me at least, by no means Prequel-levels of bad but its serious fall from the LotR movies. I guess Lucas also, however, didn’t have Tolkien.
I set out trying to say more positive and yet again failed.