The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies REVIEW

The 6th and final film of the Middle Earth saga and the finale of The Hobbit series is finally here and holy shit is it action packed! The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies or TBotFA starts immediately where Desolation of Smaug left off. A really pissed off and undiagnosed mentally ill dragon heads towards Lake Town to do one thing and one thing only. FUCK. SHIT. UP. But a giant fire breathing dragon isn't the only thing that the thirteen dwarves, Gandalf, and Bilbo Baggins have to deal with. Five armies consisting of Dwarves, Elves, Men, Orks, and a special mystery guest group are about to descend upon the Lonely Mountain to take it's vast amounts of treasure and secure its strategic position within Middle Earth.






TBotFA had a lot of hype going into the theaters, and it lived up to quite a bit of it. Smaug silently stalking Lake Town before setting it ablaze was absolutely bone chilling, intense, and probably one of my favorite scenes. The different armies showing up all at once at the base of the mountain and clashing together throughout the film was epic! From the Orks taking first place on making an entrance, to endless amounts of battle trolls, to Orlando Bloom and Evangeline Lilly doing crazy elfish fight scenes, the battle really was one of the best from the entire series.

(OH, SHIT!)

That being said, the final Hobbit isn't without some fault. One being that Bilbo is kind of sidelined for parts of the movie. A character as greatly portrayed by Martin Freeman could have used a little more screen time.

Another fault was the consequences of expanding one book into three different films finally catching up with us. In the book, Smaug going ape shit and the entire battle is probably the last quarter of the story, so there wasn't much to really stretch out into an epic large film. It's 2 hours and 20 minutes long so I didn't feel like the movie flew by too fast, but the ending felt a little sudden to me. Seeing as it was the last film in the entire saga (For now) I was expecting an emotional gut punch that we had experienced with Return of the King, Instead the battle ended, goodbyes were had and a quick journey back to the Shire occurred, all in the span of a little over 10 minutes. Though I will say the ending song did help with the closure.

Overall The finale to The Hobbit delivered exactly what it was titled. Five armies epically duking it out for the fate of Middle Earth and in the middle of it all, one small brave hobbit. It might not have been my favorite film in the series that I really love, but it was exceptionally great experience. To quote my Dad after the movie ended "That was fucking awesome!" I give it 4 orks getting beheaded at once out of 5.