Peter Jackson is a monumentally gifted world builder, but The Battle of the Five Armies is obese with dull characterisation yet skeletal when it comes to energy and narrative satisfaction. Now Playing: The Hobbit: Battle Of The Five Armies. This is visually beautiful movie, with action coming out the ears.
Making a whole movie out of a few pages from a children's book is kind of strange but fair enough. Although it still seems unnecessary for Peter Jackson to have expanded The Hobbit into three films, this culminating installment brings on all of. The Hobbit movies are so bloated they could survive at sea without flotation devices.
At that point, Jackson marshals the five armies in a battle that goes on relentlessly for days. OK, it's only an hour of screen time, but it taught me the meaning of eternity. Shortly after the climactic battle scene of this final instalment of Peter Jackson's Hobbit series gets underway, an outsize troll-like monstrosity with a pointed stone headpiece runs full tilt into a fortress wall, making a breach through which a bunch of orcs and other malevolent nasties can pour through. There are some wonderful sequences in Battle of the Five Armies, and the attention to detail is breathtaking (each different space rendered with "So began a battle that none had expected; and it was called The Battle of the Five Armies, and it was very terrible." -J. Those two movies soon got changed into three and I was angry because I was convinced the story was too The Hobbit was a book written for children, and while there are scenes in the trilogy that will For The Battle of the Five Armies, it may - I hope - be transformative. Luke Evans as Bard in The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies.
Trailer The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
By the end of the film, several armies have converged on Erebor. Elves, dwarves and humans are all at loggerheads and seemingly unaware of the threat posed to them by the hordes of murderous Orcs about to converge on them. Visually and technically, Battle of the Five Armies reaches the bar set by previous Hobbit films, but it's lacking in terms of inventiveness.
Even movie fans who don't care about J. Tolkien will have to admit that Peter Jackson's latest ventures into Hobbitdom deliver what they advertise. The previous film, "The Desolation of Smaug," hinged on the titular, cool fire-breathing dragon. Now "The Battle of the Five Armies" presents plenty.