instal the new The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Ar

This is, of course, nonsense: any thoughtful reader notices Gollum’s struggle with the remnants of conscience in his corrupted mind Frodo, Gandalf, and Galadriel’s fight against the lure of the ring and Boromir’s decline from a position of ethical superiority into groveling threats of force. Spend a few minutes on any Tolkien-related chat forum and you’ll bump into people claiming that Tolkien’s good guys are too good and his bad guys too bad. One silly accusation that is often brought against Tolkien’s work is that his moral universe is too black and white. Yet this is not a brainless action movie. Hugo Weaving in 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies' To put it bluntly: what this Hobbit needed was more hobbit. The violence that ensues takes up most of the screen time, punctuated by a few quieter scenes in which Martin Freeman (as Bilbo) and Richard Armitage (as Thorin) get to show off their serious Shakespearean acting skills. This already complicated situation gets even messier when members of the White Council-Gandalf, Saruman, Elrond, and Galadriel-gather to drive Sauron the Necromancer out of his stronghold at Dol Guldur and learn that he has long been planning to send two enormous armies of orcs to wipe out the elves, dwarves, and men around the mountain kingdom of Erebor.

The rest of the movie is taken up with the dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield’s dragon sickness, the greed of the elven king Thranduil, the desperation of the displaced people of Lake-town, and the hobbit Bilbo’s attempts to make peace among them. People flee in terror, while Bard the Bowman struggles to escape from prison in order to fight the dragon. The movie opens exactly where The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug left off: the dragon is on his way to attack the town of Esgaroth on the lake. The screenplay is poorly written, as packed with clichés as a preteen paranormal romance.Īnd yet, some elements of the messiness serve a surprising purpose: they reveal the film’s intelligent interactions with the source text and deepen its emotional impact. Action scenes dominate, with fights drawn out to laughable lengths. There are so many plot threads that scenes are short, following one another in quick, confusing succession. This final film in the Hobbit movie series is more thoughtful than the first two, and it’s compelling cinema, but it lacks a sense of closure.Īs a matter of fact, like the others in the series, this last Hobbit movie is a bit of a mess. Martin Freeman and Ken Stott in 'The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies'

Instal the new The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Ar