The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies

Diseases sometimes run in families; that may be the best way to think of the things that are wrong with this movie. As with its brethren films, this installment in the "trilogy-that-should-have-been-one-movie" suffers from the same frailties; however, here those problems are magnified due to the fact that they have festered all the way through two films already. The liberties with the story--both wild extrapolations from the original text and outright fundamental revisions to the story--are welcome least of all here at the story's climax and denouement. These deviations are all the more glaring in their lack of respect for the original material. Certain Elves don't belong in this story; a minor character is given way too much screen time; and the attempt at epic scope in the final battle just makes things confused and unclear. Ironically, a lust for dragon's gold--in this case, box office wealth--is what did in this project from the start. Let it be a lesson to future filmmakers.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

The map within the frontispiece of this film should read, “Here There Be Bloat.” Again, the tidy little story gets the stretched out treatment. The result might be more impressive for someone completely unaware of the original book. Perhaps. For the long-time fan, the result is much more problematic. The initiated viewer is constantly aware of how much story stretching is going on, of how much of what he’s seeing is not in the original tale. That’s distracting, if nothing else, and negatively impacts the viewer’s experience. Ironically, then, this is probably a movie that one would only recommend to die-hard fans--exactly the people who will be most annoyed by the story manipulations. What’s done is done, but the “three movie arc” decision really was a huge mistake.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Boy is this thing bloated. As if there were any doubt, this shows that this is a story that could easily have been told in one movie; perhaps a long movie, to get every rich detail, but one movie nevertheless. Instead, out of obvious and pure greed, the producers decided to stretch the thing out into three movies, mostly by stuffing into the proceedings every drop of backstory and subtext that could be mined from Tolkien’s original tale. The burdens of that approach are apparent: a great deal of expansion on the tangential concern about the Necromancer (Sauron, for those who only saw the previous movies), none of which matches the tone of the actual, by-the-book story at all. The resulting film is discordant and needlessly uneven. But, then again, there are moments of brilliance here: the Riddles in the Dark episode is flawlessly presented, and the (first) rescue by the eagles is an amazing sequence. There’s no point in denying yourself, if you’re a fan; go ahead and watch this flick (and the upcoming two). Just don’t reward the greed by spending a dime on it; get the disc from the damn library.