the hobbit: the five armies
When one is confronted with a movie that intends to test the bladder, one should not drink a big cup of coffee beforehand...
I realised I never wrote anything about the second Hobbit movie, which was only memorable in that I managed to get from Albury and catch the 8:30am session at George St cinemas (an approximately 600km trip XDDD)
I remember remarking afterwards, to my consultant, that it was a very long movie...in which not much happened.
Before the movie, my friend and I joked that we didn't bother reading any reviews because we were going to watch it anyway, regardless. Since it is (hopefully) the end of all things to do with Middle Earth.
It was probably a bad attitude to take into a movie, seeing something that's meant to be entertaining as a job needed to be done and over with.
I've never read the original story. The themes in the story are certainly not childish and feeds well into the next chapter (the Lord of the Rings), but it's probably not a story that was intended to be epic. Injecting gravitas into a light tale took away most of its magic, and added a lot of things that don't feel necessary.
Firstly, there's no real good reason why the arc with Smaug couldn't have completed the second movie. Even these days in the era of the neverending franchises, it's pretty hard to end convincingly on a cliffhanger, and especially not if the arc completes within 15 minutes of the next movie opening.
Secondly, Thorin's fall and climb up the figurative moral mountain hasn't been a particularly convincing one. He's too noble in the noble scenes, and too obsessed in the obsessive scenes. I don't think it's Richard Armitage's fault, because I think he's dealt with the script in what ways he can, and he manages enough threat and presence to be both a respectable king and a frightening miser. The two transformations were never going to be easy to write, and I doubt it was convincing even in the original book - saved, probably, by its more light-hearted tone and brevity, sort of like Narnia.
The movies tried to justify their length by adding side plots in a bid to make us care about the characters, some with better success than others. The ill-fated story between Tauriel and Kili and Legolas didn't seem to serve much purpose besides making it more emotionally heavy in the end, although I must say I did appreciate Thranduil saying to her, "It hurts because it was real," which is probably the most emotion he could show and the clearest admission to how much he still loved Legolas' mother after all these years. I certainly liked it better than his awkward, "Legolas, your mother loved you," because until then I hadn't realised our elf prince had gigantic mummy issues.
This brings me to the fourth point - the dialogue is distractingly uneven, some so antiquated that it's bordering on pompous, and others jarringly colloquilised, and in a lot of the more emotional scenes painfully trite. While this has certainly featured in previous movies (especially during comical scenes), when the overall tone of the movie is so dark colloquial interjections just...disrupt the mood it's trying to build.
Finally, on the subject of mood - I don't know if this overwhelmingly dark mood is what The Hobbit is meant to be about, yet in a way I don't know if there was enough darkness. It doesn't have the luxury of LOTR's strong moral message or its obvious division of good and evil. The evil in The Hobbit is a lot subtler and a lot more hidden, and perhaps required a much subtler touch. The beauty about the Ring was that it spoke to the evil in all of us, including the noblest and the wisest of us - the great elves, dwarves, men and even wizards were not immune to its corrupting power. It took folks who had simple pleasures and simple desires to resist its lure.
This message appeared in The Hobbit but in a different form. It was greed that caused the fall of Erebor, and it was greed that brought war once more to its gates. The cause for war was far less lofty, Bilbo far less noble than Frodo, Thorin far less heroic than Aragon...
It's a far less feel-good movie than LOTR. It's far easier to watch a world go bravely to war against an external force like Sauron than a war fought because of that ugly something within us all - that greed for power, or domination, or gold. Yet, there wasn't a strong link that ties this to why the world was falling to ruins a few decades down the track.
In the end, it feels like it had too much and too little of everything - the moral storyline, the emotional wranging, the fighting, the politics, the broken promises, and amongst it all there was no justification why this had to be spread over 8 hours.
I realised I never wrote anything about the second Hobbit movie, which was only memorable in that I managed to get from Albury and catch the 8:30am session at George St cinemas (an approximately 600km trip XDDD)
I remember remarking afterwards, to my consultant, that it was a very long movie...in which not much happened.
Before the movie, my friend and I joked that we didn't bother reading any reviews because we were going to watch it anyway, regardless. Since it is (hopefully) the end of all things to do with Middle Earth.
It was probably a bad attitude to take into a movie, seeing something that's meant to be entertaining as a job needed to be done and over with.
I've never read the original story. The themes in the story are certainly not childish and feeds well into the next chapter (the Lord of the Rings), but it's probably not a story that was intended to be epic. Injecting gravitas into a light tale took away most of its magic, and added a lot of things that don't feel necessary.
Firstly, there's no real good reason why the arc with Smaug couldn't have completed the second movie. Even these days in the era of the neverending franchises, it's pretty hard to end convincingly on a cliffhanger, and especially not if the arc completes within 15 minutes of the next movie opening.
Secondly, Thorin's fall and climb up the figurative moral mountain hasn't been a particularly convincing one. He's too noble in the noble scenes, and too obsessed in the obsessive scenes. I don't think it's Richard Armitage's fault, because I think he's dealt with the script in what ways he can, and he manages enough threat and presence to be both a respectable king and a frightening miser. The two transformations were never going to be easy to write, and I doubt it was convincing even in the original book - saved, probably, by its more light-hearted tone and brevity, sort of like Narnia.
The movies tried to justify their length by adding side plots in a bid to make us care about the characters, some with better success than others. The ill-fated story between Tauriel and Kili and Legolas didn't seem to serve much purpose besides making it more emotionally heavy in the end, although I must say I did appreciate Thranduil saying to her, "It hurts because it was real," which is probably the most emotion he could show and the clearest admission to how much he still loved Legolas' mother after all these years. I certainly liked it better than his awkward, "Legolas, your mother loved you," because until then I hadn't realised our elf prince had gigantic mummy issues.
This brings me to the fourth point - the dialogue is distractingly uneven, some so antiquated that it's bordering on pompous, and others jarringly colloquilised, and in a lot of the more emotional scenes painfully trite. While this has certainly featured in previous movies (especially during comical scenes), when the overall tone of the movie is so dark colloquial interjections just...disrupt the mood it's trying to build.
Finally, on the subject of mood - I don't know if this overwhelmingly dark mood is what The Hobbit is meant to be about, yet in a way I don't know if there was enough darkness. It doesn't have the luxury of LOTR's strong moral message or its obvious division of good and evil. The evil in The Hobbit is a lot subtler and a lot more hidden, and perhaps required a much subtler touch. The beauty about the Ring was that it spoke to the evil in all of us, including the noblest and the wisest of us - the great elves, dwarves, men and even wizards were not immune to its corrupting power. It took folks who had simple pleasures and simple desires to resist its lure.
This message appeared in The Hobbit but in a different form. It was greed that caused the fall of Erebor, and it was greed that brought war once more to its gates. The cause for war was far less lofty, Bilbo far less noble than Frodo, Thorin far less heroic than Aragon...
It's a far less feel-good movie than LOTR. It's far easier to watch a world go bravely to war against an external force like Sauron than a war fought because of that ugly something within us all - that greed for power, or domination, or gold. Yet, there wasn't a strong link that ties this to why the world was falling to ruins a few decades down the track.
In the end, it feels like it had too much and too little of everything - the moral storyline, the emotional wranging, the fighting, the politics, the broken promises, and amongst it all there was no justification why this had to be spread over 8 hours.