The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

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RaisedByWolves

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Just finished watching it tonight. I'm sad that this is the end of the Tolkien based movies as both the Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit series were very well done. Not usually a fantasy buff but having read the books as a kid and considering the director and source material feel that these films like Star Wars really define the sub-genre they are in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSzeFFsKEt4
 
These were a huge let-down. I'll admit that I was annoyed that Del Toro couldn't direct them and that they were going to be stylistically similar to the other ones to begin with...but between the first film pointlessly aping Fellowship of the Ring (there's dozens upon dozens of similar story sections/visual segments that could have been avoided), the monotonous sub-plots that went nowhere, the over-the-top cartoonish action sequences, the pointless parallels with the other trilogy (something Lucas also foolishly did with the Star Wars prequels)...just bleh.

I did enjoy watching the first film of the Hobbit trilogy even if it was horribly paced. It's a decent watch for a Tolkien fan to spend an afternoon with at their own leisure, but man, Desolation of Smaug was pretty much unforgivable and the reviews for this latest one contend that it's basically a mind-numbing three hour action sequence.
 
I thought this was the best of the three. The first two seemed unnecessarily stretched out to fill time, but this one was shorter and had fewer scenes that felt like they dragged on forever.


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These were a huge let-down. I'll admit that I was annoyed that Del Toro couldn't direct them and that they were going to be stylistically similar to the other ones to begin with...but between the first film pointlessly aping Fellowship of the Ring (there's dozens upon dozens of similar story sections/visual segments that could have been avoided), the monotonous sub-plots that went nowhere, the over-the-top cartoonish action sequences, the pointless parallels with the other trilogy (something Lucas also foolishly did with the Star Wars prequels)...just bleh.

I did enjoy watching the first film of the Hobbit trilogy even if it was horribly paced. It's a decent watch for a Tolkien fan to spend an afternoon with at their own leisure, but man, Desolation of Smaug was pretty much unforgivable and the reviews for this latest one contend that it's basically a mind-numbing three hour action sequence.

My father walked out on the film for the reasons you stated.
 
The Hobbit was my favorite book growing up; the movies sucked. Didn't even waste my time watching this new piece of garbage.


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LOTR: 1500 pages...9 hours.

The Hobbit: 200 pages...8 hours.

Fuck off, Peter Jackson.
 
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By my calculations, it would take someone 60 hours to finish the LOTR trilogy had it been made with that level of detail/making shit up/moneygrubbing.
 
They go that deep into the Hobbit, yet they leave out significant chunks of LOTR and had several inaccuracies. Don't even get me started on the end of 'Fellowship'. Wasn't even in that book.......it was in two towers......or the fact that they cut out basically the entire section about the king of the dead and southern gate......


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I thought the first Hobbit film was really weak despite a few great scenes. I enjoyed the second one more, but still had some issues. Like, who gives a fuck about half of these dwarves? Unlike the LOTR trilogy, there's barely anything to distinguish the members of this quest apart.

I'm reluctantly going to see this one in the theatre at some point, though many critics have said it was the best of the three so I'm cautiously optimistic. But suggesting these are the same level of quality as the LOTR films is just daft.
 
If Peter Jackson can milk a slender children's book from 1937 into three padded out movies, I'd like to see him tackle The Silmarillion next.

Actually, I wouldn't.
 
Like, who gives a fuck about half of these dwarves? Unlike the LOTR trilogy, there's barely anything to distinguish the members of this quest apart.

The sad part is that they wasted so much time and energy on giving the dwarves individual personalities/characteristics even though nobody watching these movies can tell them apart...not to mention that they don't even look like The Dwarves in the other movies who were rightfully presented with the same sort of look.

Don't even get me started on the truth that this trilogy's real name should have been Thorin.
 
If Peter Jackson can milk a slender children's book from 1937 into three padded out movies, I'd like to see him tackle The Silmarillion next.

Actually, I wouldn't.

He actually said if you ask him this in a few years he'll probably say yes.

I guess it would have to be certain stories from that book although you could kind of Cliff Note's the earliest sections of it with a cool visual intro on how the world was created, etc.

Children of Hurin would be a good candidate since there's an actual book fleshing out that story in minute detail (begun by Tolkien well before he did The Hobbit). They could just churn out a two or three hour movie following that thing verbatim. It would automatically be better than this recent trilogy and very inexpensive to make.



I think that project will actually happen and it will be interesting to watch because The Silmarillion doesn't cover the same territory as The Hobbit does with LOTR and would offer a lot of chances to branch out in terms of visual storytelling, characters and locations. If they're actually done competently (a big ask considering these awful Hobbit movies), they would easily be profitable films, probably needing to make only about $500 million worldwide a piece in order to profit, perhaps less if they hold back on the CGI (another impossible ask).
 
I think you're probably not a million miles off the mark about future developments.

I think Jackson was the wrong person to ever get his hands on these books. Guy turns The Hobbit into three bloated movies but can't find room for the Scouring of the Shire, the downfall of Saruman or the journey to the Grey Havens in his earlier epic.

For all the flash and bluster, it is still the author's original vision that lives in my imagination, coloured barely, if at all, by my memory of the 2000s films (which were, sure, enjoyable enough for what they were).
 
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