Peter Jackson concludes his Hobbit
trilogy with the exciting final installment ‘The Battle of the Five
Armies.’ As the name implies, Bilbo’s long
and arduous journey is now over and war is upon us! TBOTFA pits an uneasy alliance of hearty Dwarves,
noble Elves and rag-tag band of Humans from Laketown who survived the ravages
of Smaug against two massive Orc warhosts converging on Erebor and Dale in a climactic
Battle Royale we’ve all been waiting for since the good guys vanquished the
fell legions of Sauron in ‘Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ over 10
years ago.
Tolkien fans decried that Jackson
wasn’t faithful enough to the source material in this trilogy, but we should
bear in mind that adapting a single 300-page novel into three feature-length films
is difficult at best and near impossible at worst, since the story of ‘The
Hobbit’ can probably be told in just one movie.
Filler had to be put in to pad the movies, two of which are over two and a half hours long. Under the circumstances, Jackson
did the best that anyone could reasonably expect and it is unfair to expect
‘The Hobbit’ trilogy to equal his earlier ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, which
had the luxury of having three novels to derive from rather than just one.
While ‘An Unexpected Journey’ and
‘The Desolation of Smaug’ dragged and meandered at moments, TBOTFA maintained its fast
pace and is action packed throughout, aided by its relatively ‘short’ two hour
twenty-four minute length. Filled with
drama, betrayal, heartbreak, redemption and acts of individual heroism, TBOTFA
possesses the hallmarks of yet another Peter Jackson fantasy epic.
Grade: A
Have a merry Christmas everyone!
Santa's helpers took a break from the workshop to save Middle-Earth.
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