The Hobbit : The Battle of the Five Armies

Posted by Itheliving 9 years, 4 months ago to Movies
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The Hobbit : The Battle of the Five Armies / Rated PG-13 for violence including impaling, decapitations and trampling.
Finally. The end of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Six movies. Finally over. Maybe. The adventures which started with the LOTR trilogy back in 2001 finally makes it to an actual finale 13 years later. The Hobbit films were actually a three film prequel. They should have come first. Who knew at the time that the LOTR series would be an immense money producing machine?
Lets get right to it. First up I only counted three armies. But there were a lot of computer generated combatants and things were kind of mixed up. Maybe there were five. I didn’t see them. THTBOTFA takes up right up where the last film left off. The big dragon was about to attack and burn up a nice little resort town where everybody baked cookies and did crafts. Now we see the attack. It’s bad. This dragon is not of the Pete’s Dragon (1977) Disney type of dragon. This guy talks and breath’s fire like he has the Sun inside and it’s trying to get out. Result. Town destroyed.
Meanwhile, the Hobbits are still trying to find the Arkenstone inside the mountain castle that is full of gold. The dragon who ruled the castle and destroyed the town is dead. He was taken out by a ground to air missile. On the way to get the gold are the destitute villagers as well as the Elvin Army and the Orc Army. See, three not five armies.
There is a lot of talking and suffering. The search through the mountain of gold is not going well. This is because Bilbo aka The Hobbit has it hidden in his pocket along with the Ring which will cause trouble in times to come. He is not sure what to do as he is a wise hobbit but in way over his head.
Eventually all of the armies come together and a big fight ensues. A really big fight. The computer generated armies fight in a manner that is spirited even in comparison to other computer generated army fighting as seen in movies now too numerous to keep track of. Eventually the good armies start to lose to the bad armies and the really bad and extremely ugly Orc leader takes on the head guys in the good guy armies. Much of the fighting becomes a tad cartoonish and looks a little like the hapless Wile E Coyote in his quest to catch The Roadrunner.
Eventually the good guys triumph. Big surprise. But not until millions of computer generated combatants meet their ends and wide destruction covers the countryside.
For fans of the series Peter Jackson will have delivered the goods. For others it is all starting to look like a repeat of the previous big battles we keep seeing on screen. While composer Howard Shore reuses his primary themes his music adds an emotional support to the pathos and irony that seemed over whelmed in previous editions of the story. Nice job, Howard.
If you have not seen the previous two films this finale won’t mean much so check out those movies first. For dragon lovers the Disney version of Pete’s Dragon is being remade for a 2016 release date with Bryce Dallas Howard and Robert Redford in key roles. You can bet he will not hoard gold and destroy villages. The dragon not Howard or Redford.
Rated 3.0 out of 4.0 reasons you can bet the other lesser known works of JRR Tolkien are being explored for film possibilities. Multi part films.


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