Verdict:
This film serves as a reminder that a successful movie relies on multiple components, each of which needs to meet a certain standard for the entire project to work. A single crucial element falls short, the whole film collapses. In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, the acting is competent, and the visuals are impressively polished. However, the utterly atrocious writing concealed beneath the flashy exterior fails like a structural support beam.
Obviously, the movie offers little to newcomers, as it heavily depends on the knowledge of the previous Hobbit movies (and frankly, you have to see the Lord of the Rings movies in order to appreciate The Hobbit movies). The audience does not seem to mind this fact, and that is fine, but in that case, I want one movie ticket for all of The Hobbit movies, please. If I paid to see a movie, I would like to walk out of The Hobbit 2 and into The Hobbit 3 with the same ticket because it is the same bloody movie.
The Battle of the Five Armies is the ending to the Hobbit 2 that has been chopped off and stretched out into a full film because rich producers need to eat too, I suppose.
The plot revolves around the dwarfs being barricaded in their reclaimed mountain fortress full of riches, while various factions of Middle Earth converge on the mountain and the dwarf king has to deal with an onset of madness. However, do not take the word “plot” to heart because there isn’t really a plot here. There isn’t a story that can stand on its own.
The main premise is that the king becomes greedy, as he desperately seeks the jewel Arkenstone and wants to protect his gold. If it sounds familiar, it is because it is the same premise as in the Lord of the Rings: a desirable macguffin that corrupts you.
The script feels bloated with a lot of nothing. A fight happens, and another two fights are happening at the same time. They keep on happening, and one fight will seemingly come to a conclusion, but no, it changes gear and we are back in the same fight again but now from a different angle. As was the case with the Lord of the Rings, the movie refuses to end on moments that feel more than appropriate to end on, but unlike The Lord of the Rings, this film overstays its welcome without earning that level of indulgence.
The eagles! Let us talk about those friggin eagles. When they first appeared in Lord of the Rings helping a hero out of a corner, like the very definition of “deus ex machina”, it could have been forgiven or perhaps even explained, but now Jackson is just makes fun of himself.
The eagles highlight the fundamental issue with this film: stuff just happens. The narrative is a series of loosely connected CGI set pieces rather than a coherent story. There is no logic for the mind to grasp because you know that in this CGI-fest physics need not apply and anything could happen for no particular reason, because the makers can write anything and animate anything to fill out the runtime of the movie, and so they do.
Imagine if instead of a song that has a specific mood, an intro, a chorus, verses and an outro, what you got instead was a solo played by a robot consisting of just running up and down the music scale really fast and then a few random chords from the same scale, slammed with dramatic volume. Yes, it may technically all be in the same key, but it is still sh*t.
Several plot threads are left unresolved. Key character developments go unexplained, and pivotal elements like the Arkenstone are abandoned halfway through, along with the mountain itself—despite being the central point of conflict.
Every character is so cookie-cutter simple. The dialogue is all over the place in terms of quality. People keep narrating what the audience can see perfectly well. If you think for a moment about what is being said, much of it is just drama for drama’s sake – empty but epic-sounding rhetoric sold to you skilfully by professional actors.
The thing that angers me the most is that the audience eats this movie right up. Mr. Jackson woos the viewers with a glossy exterior and earns gazillions of dollars by selling what should’ve been a 20-minute ending to the previous film. Maybe it is just that all the weaknesses of all the Lord of the Rings movies are now getting very heavy. If you are going to watch this, it is advisable to watch right after the first two films so that its lack of independence is not as jarring.
Empty dialogue, ridiculous plot points, abandoned plot points, plot holes, and in fact, a giant hole where the plot should be. If you respect movies, do not watch this one because it does not respect you back. The Battle of the Five Armies is a well-shot and well-acted wallet squeezer.