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

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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

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The Defining Chapter

Directed By Peter Jackson Peter Jackson Starring Ian McKellen Ian McKellen  •  Martin Freeman Martin Freeman  •  Richard Armitage Richard Armitage  •  Luke Evans Luke Evans  •  Lee Pace Lee Pace Genres Adventure  •  Based-on-20th-Century-Literature  •  Epic  •  Fantasy Adventure  •  Fantasy  •  Sword-and-Sorcery Studios &
Franchises
The Lord of the Rings  •  Academy Award Nominated  •  New Line Cinema  •  Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film Winning  •  87th Academy Awards Nominated
Release Info 2014-12-10T00:00:00Z December 10, 2014
Color  •  144 minutes PG13 Rated PG13
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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey vs. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies VS.

JimmyMcGill said on 9/1/2022

"Both are great. An Unexpected Journey is refreshing, and it’s nice to start on a lighter note..." more ►

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Comments (9)

 
JC13

JC13 on 12/24/2014 Reply  · 

Defining chapter my ass. Not a good film at all and I actually like the first two (despite their problems). This one is just painfully bad though.

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Nils98

Nils98 on 12/30/2014 Reply  · 

I loved The Battle of the Five Armies, but it's also the worst out of the six by far. Here are the biggest mistakes made by the movie.

The 5 biggest issues with The Battle of the Five Armies:

1. Well, let's just address the huge frikkin' elephant (mûmak if you will) in the room; the overuse of CGI. Ok, sure the CGI does look fantastic for the most part, but sometimes it does not and when it doesn't it shows...like alot! I personally defended the first two films "overuse" of visual effects, since I didn't have that problem with them, but in this one though it's kinda ridiculous. The battle, and Smaug has to be mostly CGI, I get it, but couldn't the rest of the movie have been less heavy with the CG? If you take a look at The Lord of the Rings battles and then at TBOFA you'll see how much more realistic The Lord of the Rings battles looks. It's gritty and dirty, and for younger viewers, possibly quite scary, but in The Battle of the Five Armies there aren't anything frightening about the battle scenes. As I said, the CGI does mostly look really great, but sometimes it's overkill. Especially considering that they decided to make an entire character a fully computer generated creature - Dain - that didn't even look well (and, you know, Legolas defying gravity...)

2. The love story. Alright....*sigh*. I had hopes for this, like actual hopes about this plot. But in the end it turned out to be nothing more than a forced love story with nothing to back it up with. Tauriel and Kili as characters are great, and Evangeline Lily and Aidan Turner play their roles very well respectively. It's just very hard to take this love story seriously when it has no build up and no resolution. They should have just added Tauriel to be a badass female hero instead of a love interest. Kili should have died protecting or avenging his brother instead. And also this love story led us to what may be the worst line in the saga (and possibly the worst delivered one as well); "why does it hurt so much?!".......I got nothing to say o_O.....

3. Alfrid. Oh well. Alfrid, my dear Alfrid. To clarify I don't hate his character and I didn't hate his character in The Desolation of Smaug either ( I actually kinda dug him in that, because in that movie his screen time was justified), but in this movie he ruins some scenes. Like stuffing gold into his brassiere, I mean what the hell was that?!?!?! Both you and I, and everyone knows that Jackson can do better than this! And also, his character his so damn cliched too. I mean Wormtongue was definitely one of the weaker character's in The Lord of the Rings (which doesn't say much since almost all of the characters in those movies were incredible), and Alfrid gets more screentime than him and is much worse than him. There's like 20-25 minutes of Alfrid in this movie, that could have been spent else where (but more on that later) .

4. The lack of grit. Ok, this is probably the least mayor of these five but it still needs to be addressed. As I mentioned earlier there were grit and darkness in The Lord of the Rings movies. All the orcs were dirty and filthy, and they were like that because of the prosthetic (which is yet to be matched in any production I have ever seen). In The Battle of the Five Armies though there are very (very, very, very) few that are prosthetic. Almost all of them are CG. Though that's not what bothers me (well, obviously it bothers me, but not as much as the following thing). What bothers me is how all combat is completely deprived of grit. Sure there are a few beheadings....but that's it. That's how far that goes. I remember this particular shot when the orcs clash with the dwarves. This shot should have shown the front orc ranks being run-through by the dwarves' spears, but instead the spears collide against the orcs' armors, and yet they die. They die for nothing. Another shot sees two elves team up on an orc. One of the elf's slashes his sword against the orc's back. Against it, not through it, but against it. The sound makes a "cling"-like noise and the elven blade then bounces off the orc's armor, and then he dies. How? How can he die? The blade didn't even cut through his armor and yet he died! Dwalin also rams his hammer/axe (thingy) into the stomach of an orc, and he also died. The trolls also die by like six arrows, when it took a full fusillade of arrows to take down the Olog-Hai trolls in The Return of the King, when the Olog-Hais are around half as large as the non-canon trolls in this movie. The grit made The Lord of the Rings as good as it was. Without it, it would have felt like a cartoon (which this movie sometimes felt like during those grit-less battle scenes). This is weird since there definitely was a certain grit in the two earlier movies.

5. The runtime. 144-minutes. 144. Seventeen minutes shorter than the previous installment that already was the shortest one. I get why it's "only" 2hrs 24min. It's to speed up the movie, to improve the pacing right? Yes, obviously. People have been complaining and whining during these last two films that they are too long. So therefore this final installment has to be cut down to the bone-marrow. But did it work? I didn't think so. This movie is 144-minutes long and is stuffed with, A; a forced, unnecessary love story, and B; Alfrid. A character nobody cares about yet he gets more screentime than most characters This of course means that they had to cut alot of relevant stuff of the finished film and probably even the script. If you during this film asked yourself; "why isn't there more Bilbo in this movie?" Yes indeed, why is there not more Bilbo in this movie? After all, he is the main character. Well, the answer to that is "obvious"; because we "needed" more Alfrid and more of the romance. We "needed" that. There are characters in this movie, mayor characters that has been in all of these movies, that barely, or maybe even doesn't, get a single line in the movie. Because of Alfrid: the hunchback with a uni-brow. All of this weird prioritized time spending also leads to a very rushed ending, absent of alot of resolutions. Like, what happened to Dale and Bard and Lake-town, what happened to Tauriel after she clearly should have been killed off, what happened to the rest of the dwarves and why didn't we get to see Dain's coronation or Thorin, Fili and Kili's funeral??? So many unanswered questions just because they had to have more Alfrid and other unnecessaries.

Those are the 5 biggest issues or mistakes that I found with the film. Just felt like I needed to make this list for some odd reason. Must really sound like I'm hating this movie now, right? But I don't, I still love it. Just not as much as any of the other five or even as much as I perhaps hoped, or wanted to.

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trayoder

trayoder on 1/1/2015 Reply  · 

I can see why they changed the title because the movie is essentially one LONG battle. I did enjoy it but this trilogy is nowhere near to being in the same league as The Lord of the Rings.

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robmoviefilms13

robmoviefilms13 on 1/1/2015 Reply  · 

An underwhelming end to one of the most overhyped trilogies in history.

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MysticSpoon

MysticSpoon on 1/2/2015 Reply  · 

Who knew that the shortest film in the series would feel the most bloated.

1 person liked this  √ 

lukiushaufoy

lukiushaufoy on 10/25/2015 Reply  · 

Unnecessary Piece of crap which will drain two hours of your life for Michael Bay-esque CGI. This installment has very little story but seems so bloated. An insult to the original LOTR trilogy. Everything Nils98 said. 4.5/10.

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Celldweller7

Celldweller7 on 12/23/2016 Reply  · 

Essentially a 2 hour and 20 minutes battle sequence. The final couple minutes was charming though.

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ChrisFilm85

ChrisFilm85 on 8/18/2021 Reply  · 

The only Middle Earth film I haven't at least liked

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JimmyMcGill

JimmyMcGill on 8/27/2022 Reply  · 

It’s a tighter and more focused movie and runs 20 minutes shorter than either of the first two Hobbit films. More importantly it feels in tune with the previous movies and offers us an exciting and fitting conclusion filled with great action and emotion.

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