The Battle of the 5+ Armies

[Aganzir]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

So Tauriel doesn't die? Will she be in a super extended edition of LotR?

Indeed she doesn't! The last we see of him is when she cries by Kili's corpse and says to Thranduil: "If this is love, I don't want it. Please, take it away from me!" He, having earlier questioned their love, tells her it hurts so badly because it was true love. No idea what happens to her afterwards, which I'm not very happy about because she had potential to be something else than a mere love interest.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Aganzir

Yes Bilbo, if I were in your shoes I'd also be confused about what Thorin meant to me, but what's this queer baiting?

Martin Freeman is just a little bit confused:



Or, even better:

Originally Posted by Aganzir

Indeed she doesn't!

What! No way!

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

Martin Freeman is just a little bit confused:

Ugh, that "I'm not gay," line in Sherlock Series 3 was ghastly. Subtlety is not those writers' forte in my opinion.

As usual here in Australia we have to wait until Boxing Day for Hobbit 3 so that the cinema companies can wring as much profit as possible out of the public.

I think it's baffling that so few commentators on these films have observed how severely the message of the film's own story completely contradicts and even attacks its form and manner of distribution. It should be in the same space as something like the film adaptation of The Day of the Locust - a Hollywood film attacking Hollywood and Hollywood culture for being shallow and frenzied. Here we have a story about the evils of greed presented in an extremely greedy fashion. Surely the sequences that have been mentioned in this film will bring that into sharper relief.

[A Little Green]

On the up side:
- No Bombur falling over or Bombur eating
- Next to no funny violence; this was what upset me most about the first two films so I was very relieved to see so little of it
- Cute dwarf moments; we see more of Dwalin than in the previous ones and he is super epic, and Balin is lovely as always (and him kneeling by Thorin's body with a hand over his face was possibly the saddest thing in the whole film)
- Bard is nice and epic, although they overdid the whole "defending his family" thing a bit
- The scene where Bilbo delivers the Arkenstone to Thranduil and Bard was good overall, and Bard's facial expressions are hilarious.
- Bilbo in general. Martin Freeman does a really good job.
- White Council bonding. The Dol Guldur scene was rather weird, but Elrond supporting a collapsed Galadriel was super cute.
- Fili's death was really quite brutal, and Thorin's face when he watches it - oh dear.
- Thorin's death scene was also quite beautiful and sad, even if they had cut my favourite line in half.
- The very end, predictable but worked well.

On the down side -
- Broken spines. I was happy with the lack of funny violence, but I did get annoyed by people being thrown back first into stone walls or down stairs or down a cliff and just jumping to their feet unharmed. Tauriel alone would have died, like, seven times?
- Speaking of Tauriel, the whole Kili-Tauriel thing really got out of hand in this one, accounting for the most awkward scene I've seen in the cinema for a very long time.
- The women in general; there's one cool Laketown woman (although she never got the badass moment they were clearly building up), and Galadriel has a cool moment, but f. ex. the only role for Bard's daughters is to look scared and scream. Which would be fine for the smaller girl, but the older one is nearly an adult and still does nothing but whimpers while her little brother takes care of everything.
- The absurd animals that appear and disappear without explanation. Like the convenient rams Thorin & co ride that appear out of nowhere and then disappear just as mysteriously when they're no longer needed, or the Mongolian Death Worms that conveniently dig tunnels for Azog & co, or Dain's pig that looks exactly like a pig in an earlier Laketown scene (maybe he stole it), or the bats that are "bred for only one purpose... to be Legolas's ski lift".
- The Thorin-Bilbo-thing that went beyond bromance into something else.
- The script in general. There was no real sense of an intact plot that starts from one point and leads to another. Rather it was an assortment of scenes and epic moments and corny dialogue and absurd plot twists.
- Thorin's greed. It's not presented as Thorin being a good guy who happens to be also greedy - that would be too ambivalent for PJ I suppose - but rather OMG DRAGON SICKNESS!!!! so Thorin can still be a flawless hero who just spent a while in psychosis. Yawn.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Aganzir

Indeed she doesn't! The last we see of him is when she cries by Kili's corpse and says to Thranduil: "If this is love, I don't want it. Please, take it away from me!" He, having earlier questioned their love, tells her it hurts so badly because it was true love. No idea what happens to her afterwards, which I'm not very happy about because she had potential to be something else than a mere love interest.

She will be in a sequel: The Return of the Shadow.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I think it's baffling that so few commentators on these films have observed how severely the message of the film's own story completely contradicts and even attacks its form and manner of distribution. It should be in the same space as something like the film adaptation of The Day of the Locust - a Hollywood film attacking Hollywood and Hollywood culture for being shallow and frenzied. Here we have a story about the evils of greed presented in an extremely greedy fashion. Surely the sequences that have been mentioned in this film will bring that into sharper relief.

I agree with that. I had already concluded a bit earlier that "if more filmmakers valued cheer and song above hoarded gold, the world would be a merrier place."

[Tar-Jêx]

Hang on a minute, PJ basically shoved that really important theme of greed off to the side?

What?

I can understand shoving off important scenes like Dain becoming king. That can be justified (barely). But greed was one of the most important themes of the whole story. Adding in random rubbish is bad enough, but making greed, a major theme, less important than Tauriel and Kili's disgusting romance is unforgivable.

[Estelyn Telcontar]

After having read a few other reviews that were quite favourable, I really needed the Downs' point-of-view to clear my palate before going to see the movie this evening! Thanks to the Finns for their wonderfully acerbic and humorous summaries! Where else can you find a thread that mentions Mariah Carey, Monty Python's MoSW, and - OK, I guess "Dune" and "Sherlock" are so obvious that others will probably mention them as well.

I love the Downs and the Downers!

[Thinlómien]

How did I like it?

As a film? Utter crap.

As a Tolkien adaptation? Zero (and a half, to be fair).

As entertainment? Thanks to Volo, Greenie, Agan, Nogrod, Legate and a non-downer friend (yes, we still have those) it was a spectacle of facepalms, laughter (often at inappropriate moments), very loud WTFs and some very snarky remarks. I loved every minute of it.

Honestly, I don't think we should judge these movies as Tolkien adaptations any more. The bad thing is that they suck as movies. Everything is so epic that it doesn't feel like anything, plus the plot and the dialogue make less sense than your average B class film. It's horrifying.

I will never understand why they didn't end movie 1 with the death of Azog and movie 2 with the death of Smaug but instead everything had to happen in the last film. That about summarizes how good screenplays all the three were.

Okay, now off to read what others wrote before me and add a couple of more detailed comments...

[Aganzir]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

Ugh, that "I'm not gay," line in Sherlock Series 3 was ghastly. Subtlety is not those writers' forte in my opinion.

You know I sometimes kept forgetting Steven Moffat wasn't involved in writing this!

In any case, it's not necessarily uncanonical that Bilbo had feelings for Thorin - after all, he was referred to as queer more than once in the books! It's at least better justified than pairing Frodo/Sam, in my opinion.

[Morthoron]

Meanwhile, over at ToRn, they are high-fiving each other joyously with happy Hobbit erections, fluffed, as it were, with Jacksonian enthusiasm.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Meanwhile, over at ToRn, they are high-fiving each other joyously with happy Hobbit erections, fluffed, as it were, with Jacksonian enthusiasm.

There's no accounting for coprophages' taste.

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I tried to sum up my feelings about the Hobbit films as briefly as I could, and this is what I came up with;

If you watch the Hobbit films expecting the charming adventure story you read in the book, you'll be disappointed.
If you read the Hobbit book expecting the flashy nine hour war movie you watched at the cinema, you'll also be disappointed.

A lot of us rail against these films for their inaccuracies, misinterpretations, but all of this could be ignored if not for the massive popularity they incur. The Rankin/Bass musical cartoons may be whimsical and cringe-worthy, but are easily ignored. These films are not. They've entered the public conciousness and have, in effect, become how a lot of people view Tolkien's works. When I read the books they never came across as action thrillers, as war obsessed, or as ridiculous as the films would have us believe. Sure, there's ridiculousness in there, but it is of a different, more quaint quality.
Back when I was in high school and I mentioned to a teacher that I was reading (re-reading, more likely) The Lord of the Rings, she dismissed it, saying, "Oh it's just men with swords hitting each other for three hours." At the time I argued that the books were not like that, mentioning that Helm's Deep takes up about ten or so pages and is mostly talking. But that stuck with me as being poignant. That the films were affecting how people perceived Tolkien.

This was always my greatest fear for The Hobbit adaptations. That it would be more "men hitting each other with swords for three hours" and that would be how people would view it. Sales of the book might go up, we may even catch more new readers who take to the books. But we will all now struggle against the perception that The Hobbit is another generic war fantasy.

Perhaps that's another one of my gripes. The Lord of the Rings films, for all their faults, were still pretty revolutionary and affected films going forward. Much of the cinematography and special effects developed for those films has been copied and pasted non stop. I don't feel the same will be true of The Hobbit. Nothing blew me away, nothing surprised me. If anything, it was an extension and exaggeration of what Jackson has already done.

So, that's my preamble. What did I think of The Battle of the Five Armies?

I enjoyed the performances of most of the actors. Richard Armitage was brilliant, though the odd effects and slowness they put on his voice just made it seem ridiculous. Lee Pace was fabulous, even if his lines were mostly eye-roll worthy, his eyebrows made up for most of it. Cate Blanchett performed Galadriel very powerfully (literally and metaphorically), but again the voice distortion was a bit too much for me.

As many have said, when Tolkien's lines are used it is great, because you have brilliant actors reciting brilliant dialogue. But much of the script was innocuous at best and cringe inducing at worst.

The action was kind of boring mostly as we've seen it all before, or could have extrapolated much of it from previous films. Although some of it was just plain bonkers. There's a troll with maces for feet and hands, a troll with a battering ram for a head, trolls with catapults on their backs, and trolls with massive bellies who are just standing around waiting to get shot or stabbed. The ware-worms were kind of silly, vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.

Dain Ironfoot was really distracting as he was clearly CGI. I very nearly lost patience with the film at that point. Maybe they couldn't get Billy Conoly down to New Zealand to film his scenes, maybe he didn't look good in the make up. But that computer generated video game character was just unnecessary. I'd rather they'd recast, to be honest. Much as I enjoyed Billy's performance, it just irked me. Practical effects and make up almost always look better than CGI, and here was a perfect example. After two and a half films of proper dwarves we get a video game dwarf. Perhaps he fits in with the video game goblins, but not with his kin.

Not seeing Kili and Fili die defending Thorin with shield and body was a disappointment, but one I saw coming. Setting up Tauriel as a love interest gave Kili something to die for, which left Fili to be flung from the rooftops unceremoniously. Wasted opportunity, I suppose.

Bard was quite a nice character and I didn't have too many problems with him. The Grim Faced Man as he was in the book, had his grim moments. The killing of Smaug wasn't as bad as I had been expecting. Still very silly, still very ridiculous. But I'm glad he flew up into the sky and posed pretty much like one of Tolkien's illustrations.

The death scene of Thorin was nicely done, though. Not completely accurate, but hearing Tolkien's words (near enough) almost got me to tears. Richard Armitage played the part right I think and he gave Thorin a very Boromir-like farewell speech.

I have adored Balin in these films. He was always one of my favourite dwarves and was glad to see him still being the most reasonable one of the lot. Ken Stott plays him very well and I couldn't help feeling happy whenever he appeared on screen. But part of me wanted him to casually mention, at the end, "You know, I've been thinking about Moria recently... Ori, fancy a trip?"

Bag-End being auctioned off was a nice touch and I was glad to see Lobilia getting some screen time.

The last scene with old Bilbo recreating the meeting with Gandalf from Fellowship of the Ring was a nice touch. I did, however, notice they cut out the "you haven't aged a day" line. I wonder why?

Anyway, that's what I thought.

[Michael Murry]

Here in Southern Taiwan, the local cable TV channels have started running promotional trailers and interviews with cast members touting the upcoming release of ... well ... you know ...

I'd better not say anything else for awhile.

But I do wish to thank everyone who sat through this thing and took the time to comment upon it. I appreciate and respect your intestinal fortitude.