Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

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**Sir Arun**

just came back from watching it

*** OBVIOUSLY SPOILER ALERT DONT PARTICIPATE IN THIS THREAD IF YOU HAVENT WATCHED THE MOVIE YET OR YOU'LL SPOIL IT FOR YOURSELF***

It's been a while since I read the book, so I assume by the end of the 2nd movie there was not much book left to cover except the battle itself.

But gee, I dunno, I read the book some 10 years ago and as an impressionable kid I remember a huge epic battle taking place. 1 year later when I was 11 I read the LotR trilogy and only remembered a battle happening on the fields of Pelennor and had completely forgotten about the one at Helms Deep (or maybe because TTT was so boring in certain places that I had skipped some chapters while for example I had always found the Frodo, Sam and Gollum story far more adventurous and interesting).

In any case the rendition of the Helms Deep and later Pelennor Fields battle absolutely blew my mind during the films, while in the books I had never imagined it to be that epic, but while reading the Hobbit I had very much imagined the Battle of the Five Armies to be that epic.

But now that I saw the final film...I dunno. I just felt meh. I dont think it is becasue we are spoiled as we're living in the era of CGI rather than at the start of it (like in LotR). Even today when I rewatch the battle in TTT or RotK, I feel it is epic.

Hell, that one scene with the cart sliding across the ice in the BotFA trailer? That didnt even make it into the final film. A stupendously awkward Alfrid character that doesnt fit into Middle Earth, some weird closeup shots of characters that should have transitioned sooner, too much screentime wasted dealing with Thorin's sickness that ultimately didnt make anything more interesting, etc. etc.

tl;dr - I felt BotFA was the worst middle earth film to date.

Anyone else?

**Great White**

While it has not been released in my country yet, I will say that you cannot compare the books to the movies, either Hobbit or Lotr. The books and the movies are telling two different stories and are drastically different than one and other. There is no fair comparison

**Hordini**

I wouldn't say they are drastically different. There are some minor differences, yes, and a few things added or removed, but they are telling essentially the same story.

**Orlanth**

Sir Arun wrote:

tl;dr - I felt BotFA was the worst middle earth film to date.

This helps confirm this films place on the do not watch list.
I will wait until its on TV, and wont mind how long that wait is.

I can appreciate how you feel this film is at the tail end of a gratuitous CGI genre which was new when LotR came out. However I don't entirely agree. The Star Wars prequels were contemporary to Jacksons first trilogy, the CGI wasnt old then yet, but Lucas dropped the ball in so many ways, of which the CGI was one.

With all the extra content, bs and stretched out sword-porn I really think that Jackson has had his Lucas moment. While there was no Jar Jar equivalent, just about all the other mistakes of the Star Wars prequels were strongly apparent in the Hobbit. The first film was half decent, that is to say the bits that were basically true to the story. The second was just a Hot Mess. Jackson even thrw away most of the gifts in Tolkiens plot.
I was looking forward to Bilbo fighting the spiders, one excuse to really throw in some action scenes, but we got precious little of that. Instead we got the barrels rollercoaster with extra orcs (and elves).
even more criminal was a very simple scene descibed by Tolkien about the time when the were showing off Legolas and his elf floosie, which could well have includeed Legolas - quite honestly, and would have made for much better cinematyography.
i am refering to the scene where Bilbo is wearing the Ring and is very near an elf search party, trouble is the exposure to cold has caused him to go into a sneezing fit. With elves being as agile and sharp eared as they are, and Bilbo not being able to control his nose; that scene was a total gift. It could be anything a skilled film maker wants, bhigh tension or comic relief. It never even made the cut, but its not like the film didn't run on long enough to include it, and there was plenty of extraneous crap that could have been parted to make room for it. A waste of a great story, in part and in whole.

All in all a total waste, watch-once-on-video job. The trailers made me feel that the final nail in the coffin/film of the trilogy is more of the same.

**Hordini**

It's totally fine if you didn't like it, but it really wasn't that bad.

**Swastakowey**

Just watched it.

Its like a cartoon. Just in case you want the silliness a surprise...

Spoiler:

In my opinion, its bad. I watched the original trilogy for the first time a few months ago, this movie was by far the worst of them all. People complained about the barrels in one of the movies, the battle of 5 armies is the barrel scene for hours...

**Sir Arun**

Orlanth wrote:

With all the extra content, bs and stretched out sword-porn I really think that Jackson has had his Lucas moment. While there was no Jar Jar equivalent, just about all the other mistakes of the Star Wars prequels were strongly apparent in the Hobbit.

Are you sure? The Alfrid character was so hard to watch in the 3rd film that it made Jar Jar Binks almost like a seamless part of the Star Wars universe. I almost left the theater when he stuffed his corset with gold and juggled it around in front of Bard.

Orlanth wrote:
All in all a total waste, watch-once-on-video job. The trailers made me feel that the final nail in the coffin/film of the trilogy is more of the same.

Given how the Hobbit is about 300 pages long, and the 3rd book only had 65 pages to cover, yeah, there was not much story left to tell.

But by god there have been epic battle films made in history where the director focuses on camaraderie, the wounded, heroic deeds, and of course the right choice of music to underscore such moments amidst combat. In tBotfA, none of those happened. Rather, it felt like you were running a high quality mod on a Total War game where you let several armies clash and watch with a mildly bored expression on your face.

I liked the part where the dwarves create a shieldwall. I also liked most of the fighting. But amputee trolls with iron wires for arms and legs? Reminds me of 300...and those huge ass worms that open the tunnel for the Orc army to spill out of...why didnt the worms take part in the battle as well? Would have been epic to see them burrowing through the battlefield and then dwarves riding atop their backs and hacking away.

**Da Boss**

What a terrible film. I'm saying this now- do not waste your money on this. I'm a huge middle earth fan, massive fan of the books and the original trilogy. I kinda thought the first Hobbit film was okay, and the second could have been okay with some editing. This one is an unsalvageable mess.

Spoiler:

Before the title is even shown, we have a completely unbelievable, hammy sequence with Bard using his son as a "bolt" rest for his impromtu bolt thrower that he jury rigs together to down Smaug. Kind of William Tell in reverse. If that sounds ridiculous, let me tell you that the awful dialogue and terrible acting only makes it worse on screen.

Then we get some bits establishing that Thorin has gone over the deep end, which would be fine apart from the over the top acting. This is followed by a scene in Dol Guldur which is pretty good up until the arrival of that ridiculous bunny sled wrecks the mood. I mean, it's also hammy and OTT but it could have been an okay scene. The people of Laketown are like something out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Anyhow the whole thing trundles along with lots of really awful dialogue and lots of gurning from the cast. The scenes with Bilbo are fairly decent, but that's all it has going for it. Then the battle itself starts up. You'd think, being a wargames nerd, I would have really enjoyed this sequence, but it is devoid of any meaning, peril or drama. The orcs are like bad cartoon villains, going to down to a glancing blow on their improbably thick armour. There is no sense of drama, threat or tension. Trolls are mostly there for slapstick it seems, and one cave troll in Fellowship was far more menacing than entire legions of them here. It goes from bad to worse with ridiculous, unbelievable sequences of Legolas steering monsters into towers or running up a collapsing structure from falling piece of rubble to piece of rubble. It's just terrible, unbelievable, and not enjoyable to watch. Tauriel and Kili's awful romance is given a good chunk of screen time where Beorn is given about five seconds total? It's just really bad.

There are also a pile of logical inconsistencies, which they could have gotten away with if the other aspects of the film had been good, but when everything is this bad, it really doesn't help. Like, the orcs burrow to the Mountain using giant Were Worms. Okay. Well, why didn't they just burrow INTO the mountain then, and capture it from the inside? They would have had all the treasure and a really defensible position, and everyone else could have starved to death waiting for them while they were resupplied from underground. Or the trolls- none of them turned to stone in the sunlight. Or the fight at Ravenhill on what I initially assumed was a glacier, but turned out to be a somehow rectangular frozen lake or something.

Terrible dialogue, terrible direction, just all round terrible movie. Really disappointed in Peter Jackson.

**Orlanth**

Da Boss wrote:
What a terrible film. I'm saying this now- do not waste your money on this.

<snip>

Terrible dialogue, terrible direction, just all round terrible movie. Really disappointed in Peter Jackson.[/spoiler]

So the long and the short of it The Battle of the Five Armies is not The Hobbit III, its Bad Taste II. Got it.

**AndrewC**

Much preferred the working title of The Hobbit, Are we there yet?

Cheers

Andrew

**Eldarain**

A flawed trilogy bloated by greed.

**welshhoppo**

The giant battle does remind me very much of playing a game of Medieval 2 Total War with the Battle of Middle Earth mod turned on.

Seeing as that battle, and the run up, is what makes up 90% of the film. I could have made it at home.

**obsidianaura**

I got a bit bored really, it didn't really bring much that was new to the series.

The best bit was the White Council and Sauron IMO
It's not that it's a bad film, it's just got too much competition from the rest of those films.

I saw Paddington last week and I think I enjoyed that more

I don't know really the whole film seemed a bit hyperactive. We're doing this! Now this! Now this!!!
To be honest the film would have benefitted from being 2 films like it was originally intended.
The first film was supposed to end with the barrels on the river. The second would have been the Smoug and the battle.
Would have been a tighter film I think.

As it is now to quote Bilbo, it's "like butter scrapped over too much bread"

**Wolf**

I just got back from watching and I was rather let down, I agree about the white council scene that was definitely my favourite scene of the film.
There were other good parts on the film but I'm really disappointed with the actual battle of the five armies bit, it just seemed over the top and the cgi wasn't really the best either... And some things didn't really make sense, where did those rams come from!?

I think the extended edition will hopefully make it a slightly better film, to maybe fill in the holes that really hurt the film.

How have we come from the seige of helms deep to this...

**Dark Apostle 666**

White council was the most badass thing I've seen in ages. I've been looking forward to watching Galadriel get her war face on for ages, and I was not disappointed - and Christoper Lee hitting stuff with a stick was awesome. I really liked that during the White Council fight,

Spoiler:

Frankly, I could have watched an hour of that, and then gone home happy. But Bard was well-acted, and I liked that they didn't flinch from being accurate with the deaths in the book.

Spoiler:

Beyond that, It could have been better in places - not nearly enough of Beorn going berserk for my liking, and it seemed to jump around a bit too much, as if the cutting process was a bit rushed - but the one thing that really infuriated me was at the start of the battle of 5 armies when:

Spoiler:

I mean, come on. Did they just use old footage from Dune for that bit?
And I think Billy Connoly, although funny, was miscast. Thorin was doing so well showing us a dignified, proud warrior-dwarf, and then Connoly turns up riding a pig and telling people to sod off. It just cheapened it for me.

But there were some decent bits, so maybe it'll be like the others, and I'll enjoy it more watching it a second or third time on DVD.
At the very least, I don't feel like I wasted my time or money going to see it.

**Wolf**

I agree with you on enjoying it more the second or third time, I did really enjoy alot of it but there was just some parts that irked me or were not really well done.

**Bromsy**

Peter Jackson doesn't do restraint. Which is awesome when you are making schlock horror stuff in NZ on no budget. It doesn't work as well when you are making serious movies.

**LuciusAR**

I enjoyed the battle, but the end section where Thorin goes after Azog was overlong.

Also was it just me or where the Eagles the equivalent of the Army of the Dead in RotK? By which I mean a nice plot device used to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. All looks lost when suddenly they turn up and wipe the orcs out.

Overall I think I was put off by the cartoonish look and feel of the whole Hobbit trilogy. Everything looked like it was in 'Heroic' scale and it actually felt allot like the imagery from Warhammer or Warcraft as opposed to LOTR and I can't really reconcile it with the Middle Earth we saw in the first LOTR trilogy.

That not to say they are 'bad' films, they just don't resonate with me in the same way as the original. In fact there is a good case for comparing them to the Star Wars prequels.

**Skinnereal**

Well, it was an end to the Tolkien saga.

How much of TBOTFA was made-for-the-movie padding? The tunnels and Gundabad looked out of place, but it's been a long time since I read the book.

Lots of CGI? Yep.
Some silliness from Dane? Yeah.
Predictable deathscenes? Lots.

This was the worst of the 6 movies, and the Missus wasn't too chuffed with it, either.

**Do_I_Not_Like_That**

LuciusAR wrote:
I enjoyed the battle, but the end section where Thorin goes after Azog was overlong.

Also was it just me or where the Eagles the equivalent of the Army of the Dead in RotK? By which I mean a nice plot device used to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. All looks lost when suddenly they turn up and wipe the orcs out.

Overall I think I was put off by the cartoonish look and feel of the whole Hobbit trilogy. Everything looked like it was in 'Heroic' scale and it actually felt allot like the imagery from Warhammer or Warcraft as opposed to LOTR and I can't really reconcile it with the Middle Earth we saw in the first LOTR trilogy.

That not to say they are 'bad' films, they just don't resonate with me in the same way as the original. In fact there is a good case for comparing them to the Star Wars prequels.

There's a brilliant case for comparing the hobbit films to the Star Wars prequels and it goes like this:

Pre-Star Wars

Studio: We don't like George Lucas, we don't trust him with our money, and these scenes have been filmed badly.

Fast forward hundreds of millions of dollars in profit and some years later

Post Star wars

Studio: we love you George, sure include Jar Jar all you want, add a thousand jar jar characters if it makes you happy, and did we say we loved you.

Substitute Lucas for Jackson. It's the old problem of somebody successful getting his own way and not having somebody next to him saying this a load of bull. It's why the wheel of time books are so long and boring, because Jordan's editor was his wife.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wolf wrote:
I agree with you on enjoying it more the second or third time, I did really enjoy alot of it but there was just some parts that irked me or were not really well done.

Let's be honest - Jackson really wants to do the Dam Busters and the Hobbit films got in the way.

**Da Boss**

While Jackson deserves a lot of the blame for the Hobbit films, I would also put a lot of blame squarely at the door of his screenwriters. I remember watching the special features and finding out that all my least favourite alterations and additions came from his screenwriters.

**Hulksmash**

My issue with the Hobbit series has mostly been the overuse of CGI. The orks don't feel real like they did in LOTR. It's not that they used CGI, it's that they used it poorly.

I'll be seeing this with a buddy this weekend. Don't care if it's good or not. I'll probably rate it a meh. But I've seen all of them in theatres and our local theatre is fairly cheap. Plus it's an excuse to hang with a buddy

Oh, and BATTLE GOATS!!!!!!!

**Sir Arun**

Are people not aware of the main reason why the Hobbit trilogy sucks?

It's the music, people. The music!

A soundtrack makes or breaks a movie, this is a fact.

And I dont know why, but Howard Shore is a far cry from what he used to be 10 years ago.

The same man who gave us ethereal masterpieces that I still love to put on my system today so it can take me to a different world the moment I close my eyes, this same man has been unable to produce a single meaningful track for the entirety of the 3 Hobbit films with the exception of the one main Leitmotif (Far over the Misty Mountains Cold).

Well LotR had its own distinct and epic sounding Leitmotif as well. But it had a dozen other awesome themes. Like the Shire theme. The Rivendell theme. The Moria theme. The Lothlorien theme. The Isengard theme. The Rohan theme. The Gondor theme. geez, almost every location covered in the lotr had its own epic theme!

In the Hobbit, does Mirkwood have a memorable theme? Nope. Does Dale/Laketown have a memorable theme? Nope. Dol Guldur? Nope. Hell, Erebor???? Nope.

Here's an example of how the 1st Hobbit film can have its film footage transformed to a much more epic looking film just though the right choice of music:

**inferno445**

Alright so to start off I'd like to explain that since the hobbit films have been coming out, I reread the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, and then the LotR trilogy at the start of school to prepare.

I had an issue with Desolation when Legolas literally sees a picture of Gimli and is told his name. Legolas would probably remember something like that, or talk to Gloin at the council of Elrond since they'd already met.

The White Council was pretty awesome, and I'll accept that the changes there were kind of necessary and I guess I can think of how they made sense in the lore.

Now on to my real issue with the movie.

Spoiler:

Alright on to my other lesser issues that I don't think need to be spoiler tagged, since people reading this should've seen the movie anyway.

Where did the worms come from? Why didn't the worms help in the battle? Why didn't the worms wreck the city? Where were they in LotR helping to destroy Gondor?

The trolls should've turned to stone or an explanation be given as to why they didn't.

That one troll looks like one of the Cephalyx's wrecker things, with the two flails for hands.

This might seem kinda harsh on PJ but I feel taken advantage of. He knew he wouldn't have to make any more movies so he could mess with canon more than usual. I might think of more after sleeping on it. That is if I can get any sleep. Fething neighbors have christmas music on literally 24/7 set to their lights and I can hear it.

**welshhoppo**

I assumed the trolls were proto-Olog-hai, who can move around in the sunlight.

**LuciusAR**

It's not just the trolls, I thought only Uruk-Hai could move by daylight and normal Orcs where restricted to raiding by night, hence Sauron having to blacken the skies over Pelanor in order to move his army against Minis Tirith. Yet this battle took place in bright daylight.

I know these Orcs where from Angmar and Gundabad as opposed to Mordor but I didnt think it made a difference.

**inferno445**

LuciusAR wrote:
It's not just the trolls, I thought only Uruk-Hai could move by daylight and normal Orcs where restricted to raiding by night, hence Sauron having to blacken the skies over Pelanor in order to move his army against Minis Tirith. Yet this battle took place in bright daylight.

I know these Orcs where from Angmar and Gundabad as opposed to Mordor but I didnt think it made a difference.

I think it was that the Orcs preferred not to move in the daylight. They were able to, but they hated the sun. There's a part in TTT (page 47 in my copy) where the northerners don't want to run in the sunlight, but Ugluk forces them to anyway.

So it isn't like the trolls in TH that turned to stone. I don't know about the trolls in the battle, I guess they were of a breed that could be in the sun.

**Da Boss**

In the book, the purpose of the huge cloud of bats was to block out the sunlight if I remember correctly. They came at the very start of the battle, not at the end as in the movie, and created a shadow for the orcish troops to move under.

There were no trolls present at the battle in the book, and for all the good they did in this movie (did you see them dropping dead at Thorin's charge?) they may as well have not been there. I figured some of the baddies we saw were Giants rather than trolls, as they looked pretty different.

The "fifth army" in the book was the wargs, though they were also not much in evidence in the final battle, sadly, despite being a fairly big feature through the three movies due to the chase idea (which I've actually warmed to, as I've grown used to it.)

**Hulksmash**

I always felt the 5 armies were Man, Elf, Dwarf, Orc, and Eagle. I always thought any goblins/wargs were considered part of the Orc forces. Basically that armies were under someone's command. The orcs were actually united facing 4 seperate armies. But maybe I misread it. It's been years.

**squidhills**

Saw The Hobbit and found it to be an overlong, poorly paced mess that couldn't decide if it was trying to be LotR or an episode of Looney Tunes. Skipped the other two films. After reading this thread, I do not regret my decision in any way.