Totally agree with this review. Saw it yesterday, and even at a senior discount, it was a waste of money mostly. Dull. I fell asleep several times during the battle scenes. I am not, not, not a fan of long battle scenes, especially those like in the Superman movie (back and forth for 25 hours, it seems). Give this one a miss.
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – Thin plot, great CGI effects
Peter Jackson returns to Middle Earth to eke out the last of his money-making franchise over the space of 144 minutes. Sadly, it's a shameless cash-in. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Lord of the Rings films, but the decision to extend The Hobbit out over three instalments always smacked of profiteering. Sadly this last film …
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 16:16 GMT big_D
I watched the first installment and was so disappointed, I haven't watched the second yet.
Probably because I had just read the book, which could have easily been fitted into the running time of the first film, it is a relatively short story, shorter than the individual parts of Lord of the Rings... And the characters were not true to the story and why were the LoTR characters even in the film? They don't appear in the story! GAH!
The LoTR trilogy was very good cinema, even if they did take big liberties with the story, but the Hobbit was just trying to cash in on the LoTR's success and had very little to do with the original story. :-(
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 16:36 GMT I ain't Spartacus
I quite enjoyed the first Hobbit film. Not brilliant, but I enjoyed it despite its flaws. I hated the second one. Now, because I'be seen two, I have to force myself not to see the third.
Actually as the huge, overlong battles sequences from LOTR were the bits the editors should have cut to get the films to a reasonable length, I guess I should give it a miss.
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 05:21 GMT Turtle
@big_D
"The LoTR trilogy was very good cinema"
I rate these the most tedious movies I've ever seen. And I loved the books - well, I loved them when I first read them long long ago, in a universe... Oops, sorry. Whether I'd like the books if I were to read them now is a good question. And, although I liked the book very much, it would never even occur to me to see "The Hobbit" or any of its constituent parts.
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 09:55 GMT big_D
Re: @big_D
I must admit, I didn't follow the filming of the Hobbit, so I was very surprised, when I saw the first part, that a) only about 20% of the film had anything to do with The Hobbit and b) that it was just the first part of a new trilogy.
What really annoys with filmifaction of books is the short cuts they make. Yes, I know in many instances they have to cut the story down (where was Tom Bombadil in LoTR?), but also they re-write the characters actions and motives, so that a totally different character says something that belongs to another character or does things that another character did.
Typical examples are: that Merry and Pippin had raided Maggot's fields the week before, when actually Frodo was scared of meeting Maggot, because he had stolen mushrooms when he was a child. In the end Maggot is very friendly and helps them get to the ferry without further meetings with the black riders... Oh, wait, Maggot never even appears in the film and they are chased to the ferry by the black riders...
Or the various Harry Potter films where characters are missing altogether! How did Harry get the Gillyweed? From Dobby in the book, but in the film Dobby doesn't even make an appearance! In the film Neville has to play the role of Dobby and give Harry the Gillyweed - one of the more minor changes to the script! I still haven't managed to watch the films all the way through, they are such a travesty.
Then we have the films that have nothing to do with the books, other than the name - like the Matt Damon "Jason Bourne" films, apart from the main character's name, the amnesia and the fact that they are both spies working for the CIA, the Damon films have absolutely no bearing on the books. The Richard Chamberlain version was a much better representation.
To be honest, the Damon films aren't bad, as spy thrillers, but being associated with the Jason Bourne franchise is a bad idea, as fans of Jason Bourne will be very disappointed... If they had just come up with a new name for the character, then I wouldn't be so prejudiced against them.
-
Monday 15th December 2014 12:11 GMT IsJustabloke
Re: @big_D
Where was Tom Bombadil? Quite rightly no where to be seen or heard!
The LOTR films were superb tales of good versus bad and had they been completely accurate renditions of the books that would have been even better because the books are great stories terribly told.
The Hobbit would have made a single excellent movie or at a push two but there was never enough story there for a trilogy.
The Hobbit as a book is everything the LOTR trilogy isn't.... readable and enjoyable without having to edit out all the shit "elven poetry" and the likes of "Tom Bombadil" ... if you want that shit go read "Giles of Ham"
-
-
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 20:53 GMT Langalf
Now, to be honest, most of the LotR characters WERE in the backstory of The Hobbit. From Bilbo's limited point-of-view, they didn't exist. But, Jackson had already established from LotR that he was using the backstory bits to "flesh out" (puff up?) the story line. So, it was not unreasonable to find them in his Hobbit.
On the other hand, there was NO excuse for a 6 hour trilogy to cover a 2 hour story. <sighs>
-
Monday 15th December 2014 07:25 GMT big_D
That is the problem, the "back-story" isn't the story! The Hobbit is the documentation of the adventures of one main character and his interactions. If they had called the film "Legends of Middle Earth" or something, then it would be acceptable, but calling it the Hobbit and then ignoring the story line for the most part is wrong.
-
Monday 15th December 2014 14:50 GMT Bassey
"there was NO excuse for a 6 hour trilogy to cover a 2 hour story"
Six hours? You're kidding aren't you? Try EIGHT hours!!! It is almost 2 hours longer than the original Star Wars Trilogy and if you think of all the things that happened in Star Wars and then the six incidents that make up The Hobbit???
-
-
-
-
-
Thursday 18th December 2014 14:40 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
Re: Coming Fall 2016
Probably not. Not in that timeframe, and maybe not in any timeframe shorter than the copyright period for The Silmarillion. As I understand it, the Tolkien estate is not willing to sell the film rights for any of the other works; only The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit were covered by the 1960s sale of rights, by Prof. Tolkien himself.
-
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 10:56 GMT Steve Crook
Re: one film edit
Hmmm. Could be we have a directors cut DVD is actually shorter than the version released to ciinemas? My friend Guy (or Mark depending on where he is) told me once that the directors cut of "Bloodshack" also had this honour...
Hated the Jackson LOTR version, won't bother to watch any of this, I'll stick with faint memories of David Davis (*NOT* the M.P.) reading "The Hobbit" on BBC R4 and the book itself.
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 16:23 GMT big_D
Re: one film edit
I remember the Jackanory version on BBC when I was a kid. That was great.
I also have the unabridged (German) version from Audible. The German reader, Gert Herdenreich is very good and Achim Höppner, is really excellent, reading LoTR - I think he might have been the voice of Gandalf in the German dub of the films, but I'm not 100% sure.
-
-
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 11:38 GMT Christoph
Re: one film edit
"Hopefully someone will cleverly edit this into a one movie with filler removed, coming to a torrent site soon?"
The trailer for that is already out.
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 13:44 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: one film edit
Or you could always just actually read the book.
It even has the advantage of being quicker to do than watching all three films back to back, includes exactly the amount of the book and story that Tolkien wanted and the special effects in your mind can be at least as good...
-
-
Monday 15th December 2014 16:33 GMT Nick Ryan
Re: one film edit
Some bits of the books did go on a bit, so cutting them out of a film where the film representation would taken even longer would not help the story. However one film seems to be most about dwarves singing, and the next morphed into tedious kung-fu / wire-floaty / unfeasible action scenes and it all felt like contrived filler particularly as it didn't even add to the film as a whole, it took away.
However having seen the first two... I'll try to avoid the last but may not be successful.
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 10:32 GMT jason 7
Are the effects better than the first Hobbit movie? I watched that and was shocked that the film looked worse than the LOTR movies ten years earlier. Some scenes looked like they were done by the team that did Wing Commander game cut scenes from the early 90's.
Shame Jackson got greedy with the rest of them.
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 16:03 GMT Triggerfish
The LOTR films, they went to a lot of effort crafting armour and adding lots of extra little almost extraneous details you don't notice (*). Watching the hobbit it seemed to have been sacrificed for cheaper CG it leaves the experience lacking somehow.
*http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/jom/0211/byko-0211.html
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 23:46 GMT breakfast
Watching the behind-the-scenes documentaries for this, they actually went into the same kind of level of detail. They also did a lot of character background and some pretty cool live action stunt sequences, then inexplicably made it all look like CGI in post production. I have no idea why.
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 11:26 GMT thomas k.
no more Tolkein movies? really?
Still plenty of material to make more films from. There's the Silmarillion (all the parts he didn't work into the Hobbit trilogy). And he can always go back and add all the stuff that he left out of The Lord of the Rings movies, Tom Bombadil, say, or the battle for the Shire or the pretty obviously implied (in the books) marriage of Legolas and Gimli, left out as to not scotch Legolas' appeal to swooning teenage girls. That was a pretty shocking omission.
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 13:35 GMT Dodgy Geezer
Re: no more Tolkein movies? really?
...That was a pretty shocking omission....
Actually, the battle for the Shire was by far the worst omission. It effectively 'Hollywoodised' and made nonsense of the entire meaning of the LOTR - a fate that Tolkein expected and dreaded.
Tolkein wrote the LOTR as an English myth. It was meant to illustrate fundamental features in the English character - in the same way as Irish or German myth underlies these respective cultures. The English are shown as parochial, stubborn, neither particularly intellectual nor romantic. And yet, when called on in dark times, they are capable of rising to the occasion and saving the world. And when they do, they gain nothing from this, and end up damaging their own land such that it is never the same again.
That's why the Battle of the Shire and the departure of Frodo are key parts of the cycle - missing one of them out shows that the film writers had no idea what the books were about. That, and the continuous refrain of Irish incidental music ...
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 13:08 GMT Handle12345678
The hobbit: five battle armies movie is AMAZINGLY FANTASTIC!!
This review as a mountain troll once said "a load of rubbish" .. I went to the movies with my friend yesterday and I had a fantastic time watching The Hobbit 3..
The movie from start to finish was absolutely enthralling, amazing, stunning, exquisite, invigorating, energetic, mind engaging, fantastic and every other word in the English dictionary that could describe someone's ecstatic feeling about a movie.
I am a big fan of LOTR & the Hobbit trilogies & also a fan of Game of Thrones (Books & the series). Never did I ever think Game of Thrones would ever come SECOND in my opinion as best screen picture until I saw the Hobbit 3. I will buy the Hobbit 3 DVD directors cut when it comes out and will watch it at least 5 times in the following weekends just like when I did so with LOTR trilogy 13 years ago when I was just 11 years old!!..
Bottom line.. anyone who read/reading this non sense article probably aimed to discard one of P.Jackeson's masterpieces out of jealousy or whatever ridiculous reason.. I URGE YOU go watch it and I promise you, your money will not be wasted
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 14:22 GMT Joe Drunk
Re: The hobbit: five battle armies movie is AMAZINGLY FANTASTIC!!
Yup, when I was your age I was easily distracted and entertained by exciting special effects, explosions, slow-motion fight scenes, CGI morphs etc. Apparently Hobbit is targeted towards people your age as it it mostly special effects, little content.
I did like LOTR trilogy and as someone who read Tolkien at age 12 I was disappointed to learn Hobbit was going to be stretched out to 3 movies.
I realize it is a business and trying to squeeze out as much money from the franchise as possible is a wise move as it appears to have a large established base of loyal
customersfans who will eagerly part with their money on anything Peter Jackson, regardless of how mediocre.-
Sunday 14th December 2014 09:12 GMT Handle12345678
Re: The hobbit: five battle armies movie is AMAZINGLY FANTASTIC!!
yes I never expected The Hobbit trilogy to aim for people over 40 (No disrespect intended) who want a Sherlock Holmes plot all the time. Also just because I'm under 30 doesn't mean I'm 'gullible' or 'vulnerable' to CGI mastery and I can truly point out the difference of a good story from a bad one because we all learn that in school and further so in life.
I'll back up my positive support for the movie from Forbes as below
"There are going to be a lot of people anxiously hoping for a weak opening domestic weekend, ready to declare just about anything a failure or under performance because such headlines and grim pronouncements attract attention and generate link clicks."
ANY MOVIE is considered a success or failure based on how much money it makes regardless on how much it has in creativity, content, characters or real-life big name actors and that doesn't mean shame it just means being clever. Lots of people have been waiting for P.Jackson to fail for some reason.
12 dollars for a 3D ticket for a Movie is cheap and doesn't deserve the phrase "part with their money" as if 12 dollars is way too much to spend on any movie for that matter.
Finally the majority nor I believe Peter Jackson is capable to produce a "mediocre" film. Only time will tell.
-
Monday 15th December 2014 09:52 GMT DaddyHoggy
Re: The hobbit: five battle armies movie is AMAZINGLY FANTASTIC!!
"yes I never expected The Hobbit trilogy to aim for people over 40 (No disrespect intended) who want a Sherlock Holmes plot all the time."
Do you know what us over-40s wanted (well this over-40 anyway) - we wanted the plot (and characters) from "The Hobbit" - you know the actual book written by Tolkien - the author Jackson claims to adore and respect.
-
-
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 16:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
I thought I was in the Reg forums
Turned out it was just a another movie-snobbery website.
Sorry to hear that this movie pained the tender sensibilities of all the reg-tards. I'm sure it will have a big impact (not) on my decision to go see it.
Why do I get the feeling that the movie-snobbery reg-tard crowd is the same group as the fanbois-sheeple-Jobsian crowd? Hmmm.... Same "consumer-as-victim", "save-me-from-myself-and-my-unmet-expectations" vibe from this group of comments. Got to wonder how many of the comments were tap-tapped onto bent iPhone 6-pluses?
-
Saturday 13th December 2014 23:59 GMT breakfast
I know that you mostly came here for MY opinion
I watched it on Friday and, as a somewhat uncritical fan of both Tolkien and Jackson's version of Middle Earth, I really enjoyed it.
Certainly more taut than it's two predecessors, with more storyline and less pointless running about, it pulled things together nicely and - in my view - retained a lot of the book while doing so.
A lot of people seem angry with these films for not being something that they could never possibly have been - the Hobbit is not the Lord Of The Rings and so the films are not going to be similar. They've done a fair job of taking that story into the more fully realised world of LOTR and made two enjoyable films - that probably shouldn't have been three - in the process.
The actors did a great job, the story was well told, the CGI battle scenes mostly made way for relevant character storytelling, from where the previous film started, this was pretty much an ideal ending.
Basically, if you found the previous films passable to enjoyable, you will probably like this one a little better. If you found them intolerable, then this really isn't for you.
So now that we have Tolkien out the way - and I really hope that we have - what are the odds of seeing some more recent fantasy get a cinematic treatment? Surely these films - and the GRR televisations - have shown that there is a market?
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 09:29 GMT NogginTheNog
Two geek director legends
Does anyone else see parallels between Peter Jackson and everyone's other favourite love-hate legendary director George Lucas?
Both are clearly from the geek side of the sofa, both unexpectedly hit the motherload with a fantasy adventure, both then went on to milk the franchise for all it's worth, both have questionable beards..?
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 09:51 GMT OzBob
Saw it yesterday in HFR 3D here in Wellywood
Not half bad, did drag on at the start and I will admit it is basically a vanity piece after the LOTR. The madness scenes with Thorin were quite effective and it did not feel as contrived as the first 2 (with the introduction of the love interest yadda yadda). Sir Pete should have trimmed it at 2 episodes but I'll buy the 3D edition of this one in 9 months to complete the set.
-
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 19:16 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: So now the Hobbit is finished
Apparently a film about a bombing raid which was actually designed to drown as many civilian workers as possible under the guise of attacking a strategic target ( which was back in operation within a couple of months ) is delayed by concerns over offence caused by the use of latin in a dog's name.
-
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 15:14 GMT Vociferous
There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
Even today computer animation has not progressed to a point that it integrates seamlessly in movies, and it gets worse the better quality the video is (e.g. 4K @ 50Hz). Most people can ignore that and suspend their disbelief at the resulting mix of obvious live footage and obvious computer graphics, which is great for them -- because I, sadly, can't, and CGI seriously reduces my enjoyment of movies.
To me watching any movie which CGI is exactly like watching someone play a computer game: it can be entertaining, but at no point am I in any way convinced what I'm watching is real.
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 21:58 GMT Morten Bjoernsvik
Re: There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
Great CGI effects are when you do not notice them. Almost all productions today have CG rendered scenes. I'm pretty sure you mostly never notice. A mainstream program like "Downtown Abbey" have a large post production crew removing artifacts like cars, telephone lines, modern windows, Airconditions etc, just making the various sceneries looking from within the right time period. Much faster and cheaper than creating replicas.
-
Sunday 14th December 2014 23:51 GMT Vociferous
Re: There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
Great CGI effects are when you do not notice them.
Yeah, and that's the thing: they're so very easily noticed. There's absolutely no mistaking, say, Lake Town in The Hobbit, or the droid factory in Star Wars ep. 2, or the action scenes in the recent Mad Max trailer, or anything in any Marvel movie ever, for reality. It is state-of-the-art CGI, and screamingly obvious.
"Downtown Abbey" have a large post production crew removing artifacts like cars
That's no doubt true, and perhaps it's easier to remove things undetectably than adding things undetectably. Certainly fake carriages and city scapes are easily detectable in period pieces too.
-
Monday 15th December 2014 10:01 GMT Vladimir Plouzhnikov
Re: There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
Even if CGI is still noticeable it is still a big improvement on plasticine stop motion animation, crude mattes and cardboard flying saucers on strings that are the alternative. As nostalgically endearing Ray Harryhausen's figurines were, they still look blatantly more noticeably unreal.
It's sci-fi or fantasy, which by definition means it's unreal and is happening in non-existent places.
Unless you shoot on location on Geonosis and build a fully operational replica drone-building factory, the CGI is the best available option and its state-of-the-art is unquestionably getting better (when it is done properly and not as in, say, Dr Who or the like).
Of course, it does not make up for the deficiencies of the script, plot holes, poor acting etc - but these things are not dependent on whether there is CGI or not.
-
Monday 15th December 2014 12:14 GMT Vociferous
Re: There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
> it is still a big improvement on plasticine stop motion animation, crude mattes and cardboard flying saucers
I honestly don't see that, unless we're talking 1950's Plan 9 type special defects. The last generation of physical props, in the 1990's, were more real-looking than the current generation of CGI.
> , the CGI is the best available option and its state-of-the-art is unquestionably getting better
Getting better, yes, but still far from good. Surely you agree that it's easy to spot CGI in blockbusters, and not just because of the subject matter?
-
-
-
-
Monday 15th December 2014 12:47 GMT graeme leggett
Re: There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
It's not too bad when it's used to create an animation, as opposed to a live action film.
Watched the 2013 Captain Harlock Space Pirate ( or was it Space Pirate Captain Harlock?) film Saturday. Bit of space opera epic.
And then yesterday 5 of the 12 episodes of Arpeggio of Blue Steel, a more traditional style of animation with the anime tropes but CG rendered.
-
Monday 15th December 2014 13:03 GMT Vladimir Plouzhnikov
Re: There's no such thing as "great CGI effects".
I think we have to agree to disagree. For me, models are just as conspicuously noticeable as CGI though the combination of both sometimes works very well.
Coming back to the specifics of the latest Hobbit - I actually found the live action parts of the movie to be more distracting than the CGI. With the latter, I at least was in an automatic suspension of disbelief mode.
The live scenes, however, all looked like they were coming from a "behind the scenes" documentary. No cinematic feel to it at all. I don't quite know why that was so - was it specific to RED Epic cameras? Was it 48fps frame rate? Or perhaps the 5k resolution?
-
-
-
Monday 15th December 2014 15:55 GMT Stuart Castle
Probably give this a miss..
I will say, before I start, that I have never read The Hobbit, or the LOTR Trilogy, so won't comment on how true they are to the books.
But, I loved the three Lord of the Rings films. Wonderfully epic, where needed, and more personal where that is needed to.. I also thought the battle scenes were amazing.
So, it was with some excitement that I watched "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey", but I came away thinking that while it was a perfectly competant film, it was lacking something. It was too drawn out. Peter Jackson seemed to be looking to create epic scenes where the story did not need them, and it seemed that a lot of the story was just padding. I never bothered with "The Desolation of Smaug" and probably won't with the new one either..
-
Monday 15th December 2014 16:44 GMT cs94njw
Yep - it was boring. Once you've seen the battles in the LoTR films, there's nothing new to see.
The only "good" bit was the first 15 minutes where the Elves are actually bad-ass. Although I notice they did f**k all in the LOTR movies in comparison....
The ending is like... "meh". Boring as a boring thing.
Also.... unless I was really tired... I didn't think the HFR was as good... or something. It didn't seem that special.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
