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]
