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The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies |OT| One last time

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Vashetti said:
Yup.

Bilbo "When faced with death, what can anyone do?"
Gandalf "How shall this day end?!"
Dwarves charging on rams
Several of Thorin's company riding a 'chariot' and wargs charging toward them

All missing from the final film.
Click to expand...

Also missing was the arrow volley.
 
Saw it earlier and wasnt reallt a fan
Dodgy pacing and editing, horrendous CGI, spending way to long on
Thorin and Azog yet they can only spend about three minutes dealing with Dol Goldur and Sauron, in a pretty ridiculous way

The two people I saw it with really like it so I was the odd one out
By far the most ridiculous bit was
Legolas walking up a collapsing bridge, some stupid video game shit

I think I was expecting more Return of the King so I've only got myself to blame


edit; I think I'll like the extended edition
just felt like bits were missing
 
Matt_ said:
Saw it earlier and wasnt reallt a fan
Dodgy pacing and editing, horrendous CGI, spending way to long on
Thorin and Azog yet they can only spend about three minutes dealing with Dol Goldur and Sauron, in a pretty ridiculous way

The two people I saw it with really like it so I was the odd one out
By far the most ridiculous bit was
Legolas walking up a collapsing bridge, some stupid video game shit

I think I was expecting more Return of the King so I've only got myself to blame


edit; I think I'll like the extended edition
just felt like bits were missing
Click to expand...

I know exactly what you mean, I could feel bits throughout where it felt like things were filmed, but cut.

Join me over in the spoiler thread if you all want!
 
saw this tonight and liked it a fair bit. the start suffers from the terrible choice to end DOS where they did, leaving the opening twenty minutes payoffs to the last film lacking any stakes or meaning and feeling deeply anti-climactic. a mess. yet when the film itself gets going i warmed to it.

feels like the fourth lord of the rings film in its structure and imagery, very akin to the twin towers or return of the king, with a clearly defined political and character driven face off established between a few factions, then an extended huge action scene. jackson loves being able to bring out his grand shots of armies lining up in open fields, zoom out then pan across big landscapes covered with fighting, then zoom back in. the action is really really fun to watch like the barrell sequence in DOS and i felt while the film evoked lord of the rings constantly it remained true to the lighter hearted tone of the hobbit trilogy overall which helped distinguish itself, lots of comedy, lots of silliness in there. there's still clunky dialogue, bits of ugly cinematography, the battle goes on way too long, there's not enough bilbo and god the stuff between kate from lost and the dwarf sucks, but it's a fun watch.

now the trilogy has finished it's interesting to reflect on the trilogy overall (though i'd like to see it in extended form one after the other, the opening to TBOFA might work in that context, to get a better grasp). it's a weirdly incoherent trilogy that i broadly like, people who say it's like the star wars prequels are crazy but it's nowhere near as good as lord of the rings. the first film is delightfully largely true to the tone and feel of the book, using the lengthy running length to really let the characters and scenes breath, it's a slow laid back adventure focused on bilbo, marvelously played by martin freeman. the second almost feels like a response to the criticism, lots of people said the first was too boring :(, so in the second they crammed in as much as possible into one film. there's a million storylines going at a million miles an hour and none of them are really well done, it's lord of the rings in pacing except what happens is dull and poorly made. a bad film in nearly every sense. the third then is lord of the rings with the stakes and grandeur we expect from that kind of story, done pretty well, but then when bilbo appears it almost feels awkward like it's barely his story anymore. trying to find a throughline is quite hard but overall i'm glad it exists, even if it could have been done a lot better in many ways.
 
Empty said:
saw this tonight and liked it a fair bit. the start suffers from the terrible choice to end DOS where they did, leaving the opening twenty minutes payoffs to the last film lacking any stakes or meaning and feeling deeply anti-climactic. a mess. yet when the film itself gets going i warmed to it.
Click to expand...

zert said:
Saw it yesterday, really fun movie. The ending was perfect to start watching FOTR right away.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. Also, I think the movie drags on for too long in some parts.

Dol Guldur doe nnngh
 
Matt_ said:
Saw it earlier and wasnt reallt a fan
Dodgy pacing and editing, horrendous CGI, spending way to long on
Thorin and Azog yet they can only spend about three minutes dealing with Dol Goldur and Sauron, in a pretty ridiculous way

The two people I saw it with really like it so I was the odd one out
By far the most ridiculous bit was
Legolas walking up a collapsing bridge, some stupid video game shit

I think I was expecting more Return of the King so I've only got myself to blame


edit; I think I'll like the extended edition
just felt like bits were missing
Click to expand...
Came in here to post thoughts on the films, only to discover that my thoughts had already been posted. That
Legolas bridge scene
was just completely and utterly fucking ridiculous looking... like how did anybody involved in the creation of the film look at it and think "yeah, that is spot on"?
 
Yeah, saw it last night. Did not have high expectations, because I didn't really enjoy the first two either.

Let me start by saying that I quite enjoyed watching the movie. There's a lot to do and see, epic battles, lots of characters, different settings, ... It keeps you engaged...

And now for the bad part. Oh boy.
+) Orcs are absolute beasts, and in one-on-one fights they're though bitches, yet in the big epic battles they fall like dominos.

+) I know it's something you have to take with these movies, but the "Bold and Beautiful" lines, delivery, character positions on scene, .. was just too much for me.

+) The weasel character was just awful awful awful. His story goes nowhere, and he seems lifted right out of a bad Disney movie.But his Helen Lovejoy quote made me chuckle.

+) The dragon dies in the first 20min of the movie. Very anticlimactic, and in a ridiculous way (the son as a support for the bow, acompagnied with more Bold and Beautiful father-son dialogue. Perhaps I had wrong expectations about the importance of the dragon, but I also think it's fair to say the marketing for the movies just hyped up the dragon to lure in the masses.

+) Huge epic battle involving thousands upon thousands of characters. One side is losing heavily. But wait, suddenly 9 more guys take charge. What a tipping point, good guys saved! I know you can explain it as "morale shoots up because the leader is back", but it was just too unrealistic for me to accept.

+) Lol at the love triangle.

+) The kids from Bard are insufferable and totally unnecessary.

+) Some fights are utterly cartoony: the guy attacking a troll on a cart, legolas running up a stairs of falling rocks, ... (that last one caused some laughs and snorting in the cinema, and they weren't the good kind).
Conclusion: I was entertained, but found it all in all a pretty stupid movie.


N.B.: Christopher Lee / Saruman is the highlight of this movie for me. He kicks so much ass, and you get a small hint of his downfall. And while Cumberbath is the "cool voice guy", he doesn't hold a candle against Lee. So good.
 
This movie was kind of nothing for me - this is concerning because this is the film that stuff actually happens in, but it was just boring. I enjoyed the other two films more, they had a sense of journey, discovery and fun that this one lacked.
 
After hearing that they showed BotFA in HFR *2D* at Butt Numb A Thon I really wish more theaters would do that...

anyways, secured by Weds morning ticket for HFR 3D in IMAX.

I get off work at 8am, then walk about 1 block from work to the IMAX for the 9AM showing. Not expecting much of a line so that should be plenty of time.

And the ticket cost me less than $5 thanks to AMC Stubs :d

Really couldn't ask for a better way for it to pan out. Short of a free ticket I guess. :)
 
Going to an IMAX trilogy showing today. If I don't post back by midnight MST tonight, assume my insides exploded from sitting in one place too long. Otherwise I will give you my thoughts bearing in mind that I saw the other 2 immediately beforehand. My viewing party also watched 1 LOTR a week leading up to this, except we're dumbasses and didn't start early enough so we left out ROTK. I look at it as: if this movie sucks we can still have a real ending later.
 
Anyone want a fun to read article that won't make them angry?

The Hobbit: How the 'clomping foot of nerdism' destroyed Tolkien's dream - and the fantasy genre

It's one of the great literary tragedies of our age that Lord of the Rings, not its sprightlier prequel, served as the blueprint for modern fantasy HOLLYWOOD ARCHIVE

By Laurence Dodds

Lord of the Rings is rubbish. [and here we go] It’s a gigantic, sprawling trek of boring asides to even more boring battles, flecked like mouldy bread with tedious moralism. The crowning achievement of the films is that they managed to wrest even the shade of a passable narrative rhythm from the turgid morass of the books – books which I, at 14, had to break up with four or five novels of Terry Pratchett to even get through.

By contrast, returning to The Hobbit is like visiting a lost world, one which 20th century fantasy left behind. It’s almost surprising in how much fun it is compared to the exhausting trudges that followed. So with the third and final Hobbit film now upon us, it’s worth asking: why was it Lord of the Rings, not this sprightlier prequel, which served as the blueprint for modern high fantasy?

What we see in these two sets of books is Tolkien writing in two spirits. The Hobbit is Tolkien in the spirit of the storyteller, the spirit of the medieval tales which he took for his inspiration. It has the humour and lightness of Anglo-Saxon poetry, with its punning heroes and comical understatement. Like them, it gestures towards ancient legends to inspire a sense of awe and history.

But Lord of the Rings is Tolkien in the spirit of the archivist – a serious man who does serious work and does not abide half measures. It is the spirit of his seminal scholarly work on Beowulf, Gawain, and the Pearl poems – and of the Oxford English Dictionary, where he spent years meticulously tracing the etymology of Germanic words which began with the letter W. It is a noble spirit and an admirable spirit and a spirit of great interest to many people. But it is not a spirit for storytelling.

This is what British sci-fi author M. John Harrison called “the clomping foot of nerdism” – and, unfortunately for all of us, it has taken over. In an essay which caused a storm in sci-fi’s teacup back in 2007, Harrison criticised the urge, felt by both authors and fans, to exhaustively catalogue every detail of an unreal world as if it were a real place rather than a literary device. Often, nerd desire for this kind of encyclopaedic knowledge outstrips the author’s ability to provide it. William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, recalls a visit from two men who wanted to turn it into a Dungeons and Dragons style roleplaying game:

"They set me down and questioned me about the world. They asked me where the food in the Sprawl comes from. I said I don't know. I don't even know what they eat. A lot of krill and shit. They looked at each other and said it's not gamable. That was the end of it.

The Peripheral [his latest novel] is not gameable. It has a very high resolution surface. But it's not hyperrealistic down into the bones of some imaginary world. I think that would be pointless. It would be like one of those non-existent Borgesian encyclopedias that describe everything about an imaginary place and all of it is self-contradictory.”


Yet Borges’ labyrinths now exist in the hands of men like Leland Chee, the chief continuity officer at Lucasfilm. His job is to keep a giant database of everything which has ever happened in the Star Wars universe and make sure none of its books, comics, videogames or sexually suggestive lollipops contradict each other. When contradictions do arise, nerds use the notion of 'canon' to distinguish events which ‘really happened’ from ones which are merely apocryphal. The term was first used in the 1930s by fans and scholars of Sherlock Holmes, who, in their quest to put his adventures in chronological order, had to rule out those of unclear relation or dubious authorship.The full absurdity of canon was laid bare this year by Lucasfilm’s announcement that the voluminous Star Wars ‘expanded universe’ – that is, the novels and comics which kept money rolling in between the last of the original films in 1983 and the series’ return in 1999 – would be excised from the canon to make room for a forthcoming film. These works will now be marketed as “Legends”: that is to say, they are only stories, as opposed to all those other stories about furry bounty hunters and magic space ninjas which really did happened.

What nerds are chasing when they get passionate about canon is a fantasy of purity – the idea that a fictional world could be solely dictated by its own internal consistency and not by real-world demands. But they are forgetting how the original, Biblical canon was formed. Like some humming simulation, fantasy canons can be quickly snuffed out if their owners in the real world decree. Star Wars is changing because the people who own it want JJ Abrams to make a new movie and make them more money. They believe he can’t do that if he’s bound and encumbered on every side by the intricate designs of its previous stewards. That, in the end, is that.

Sometimes, a fantasy brand is small enough, or depends enough on its nerd audience, that its creators are forced to listen to their demands – we might call it nerd capture. But this can actually stop the fantasy from ever being marketed to a wider audience. And even in canons completely controlled by passionate nerds, where there is no corporate interest involved – online roleplaying communities, for instance, with collaboratively written worlds – the rule of power holds true. What is canon and what is heresy will always be determined by whichever nerd can sway the others to her vision. On web forums and chatrooms across the world, for the lowest stakes imaginable, they re-enact the history of early Christianity. It is not reason but economic ownership - or, where there is no ownership, social status - which governs all fantasy canons. None can escape the material world.

The graphic novel by David Wenzel captured the breezy levity of Tolkien's book
Tolkien had become a hot commercial property himself before he was allowed to publish his most encyclopaedic works. The Silmarillion, edited and published after his death by his son Christopher, takes nerdism to its logical conclusion: a gigantic collection of myths and legends, with no central ‘plot’ as such, which comprehensively explains the history of Middle Earth. Tolkien had never managed to finish these works, feeling they required revisions which he never made, and Christopher admitted in his preface that they could not be made completely consistent with themselves or with what had come before it. With their publication, Tolkien joined a long line of literary characters – from Walter Shandy, whose son grew up faster than he could write his parenting guide, to Edward Casaubon, who wanted to index the myths of the world but lacked the spark of life which created them in the first place – defeated by the dream of a total archive.

But that dream is what made Lord of the Rings so attractive to those who came after Tolkien, because for a certain kind of mind building an archive is so much easier than telling a story. Humans of nerdish brain looked Tolkien’s work and thought: hey, this is easy! All I need to do is create a massively overcomplicated fake history with the barest excuse for a hackneyed plot to drive it! An entire generation of fantasy novels was predicated on the idea that a coherent world was more important than an interesting literary text, and in a society where our consumer habits have increasingly become our identities, there is a ready-made audience for books which reward the archivist reader. What’s more, the very activity of canon formation is what nerds most enjoy: obsessively mastering a set of authorised texts, declaring their group allegiance through their memory of its most obscure passages, and then lawyering each other furiously wherever the authors leave gaps. We would all be so much better off had fantasy authors followed the example of elderly Tolkien, or even Borges himself, and just written fictional encyclopaedias.

I was sad but not surprised to read from our film critic Robbie Collin that the final Hobbit film has totally succumbed to that ‘clomping foot’. Tolkien’s silly little story, which dispensed with the ‘battle of the five armies’ in “prose as tightly wound as a haiku”, has been stretched out into three gigantic films, padded out with fan-pleasing asides to fill in blanks in the histories of Gandalf and Galadriel. This is typical nerdism, which cannot imagine an imaginative gap which does not exist to be filled. It is also good business. Less the spirit of the archivist, perhaps, and more the spirit of the accountant.
Click to expand...

TL;DR - The Hobbit should have shaped fantasy today, but the boring as all fuck worthless tree-killing waste of paper LOTR did - and killed the genre by making every modern fantasy novel an encyclopedia with dialogue.
TL:DR #2 - also, nerds are nerdy
 
One part I do agree with is that the Hobbit is a vastly better novel than Lord of the Rings. the Hobbit is nearly flawless as a fantasy story.
 
Watched all LOTR movies over the weekend, watched the first hobbit today, and gonna watch hobbit 2 tomo before heading to the movies tomo night. I CANT FUCKING WAIT! people can hate all they want but im gonna love this movie as much as i love the other hobbit movies. i cant believe middle earth ends tomo for me.
 
Just watched it. I was in love with the first three lotr movies (still love them), they were so magical and amazing to me. All these new Hobbit movies... well I don't want to shit on them too much so I'll just say they weren't for me. At all.
 
If you liked the prior two films, you'll enjoy Battle of the Five Armies.

It is smaller in scope than you'd expect though and the best fight happens entirely outside the "major" battle.

Elrond + Galadriel = Best ass kicking of the film.
 
Just got home from a back-to-back, non-stop 8 hour marathon of all three films. The ending ties in so perfectly with the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. I can't believe it's all over now. It feels like just yesterday that it was announced that Jackson would be the director after del Toro left... How time flies. Can't wait for the Extended Edition. I need more.


But wtf at Thranduil just letting Legolas go like that... And then his parting words... Jaysus. Made everyone in the theater stop and go "WTF? REALLY?"

Oh, and the bridge running, too. The fuck?
 
tcrunch said:
Going to an IMAX trilogy showing today. If I don't post back by midnight MST tonight, assume my insides exploded from sitting in one place too long. Otherwise I will give you my thoughts bearing in mind that I saw the other 2 immediately beforehand. My viewing party also watched 1 LOTR a week leading up to this, except we're dumbasses and didn't start early enough so we left out ROTK. I look at it as: if this movie sucks we can still have a real ending later.
Click to expand...

k. So my crew was split evenly on whether the 2nd or the 3rd movie is the worst. I feel like the CGI gets worse with each one, but I don't necessarily count that against the movie. My background: I read The Hobbit book when I was little and enjoyed it, loved the animated movie, loved the PJ LOTR movies, did not get past the first chapter of the first LOTR book.

Shout-out to the heavy breathing nerd behind me that bore the distinct unshowered smell of sour nacho cheese and rasped inane comments like what the power level of each color of wizard is. Bear in mind my seat location was perfect for viewing the film, but at the cost of having this guy behind me for 8 hours.

Here are my thoughts fresh off the fryer:

Are videogames becoming more like movies or are movies becoming more like videogames? This is a question that occurred to me more than once watching this film. Pretend the Helm's Deep or Gondor fights were a whole movie and that's pretty much TBOTFA for you. If you want to watch lots of CGI things fight each other and Legolas perform increasingly fantastical CGI stunts then this is the movie for you. Other reasons you may want to watch this movie:

-To see Tauriel's character evolve in pretty much the worst direction possible.
-To see random locations and creatures from the books(?) as visualized by PJ's concept artists. (I don't remember The Hobbit taking place on
Middle-Arrakis
.)
-To see Galadriel
turn blue again. Have I mentioned that depicting powerful women as having "bursts" of extreme power followed by faint spells is an annoying trope.
PS those other guys in G-Crew also kick some ass.
-To see a
bear
paratrooper.
-If you are tired of "Bombur is fat" humor and instead want to see "man dresses in women's clothing" humor.
-If you are deeply invested in the fate of the unibrow not-Wormtongue assistant to Laketown's master from the last movie.

Smaug
dies in the first ~10 minutes so you don't have to worry about his death throes encroaching on the rest of the film's substance. His death scene is also pretty cool looking imho.
All the leaders of the various armies now have an animal mount to represent them, you know like how Thranduil has his elk, Azog has his white warg, Bard has his thrush-not-appearing-in-this-film. I will let you guess what Thorin's animal ends up being. There are several "hey did you know this movie connects to Lord of the Rings" moments, which didn't really add anything to my experience. Sample paraphrase from one of these: "The rangers call him Strider. I will let you find out his real name for yourself."

So you know that idea "show don't tell". This somehow applies even to TBOTFA's emotional climaxes despite that most of them are showing you close-ups of the climaxing character's (sorry) face. There is about 1.5 minutes of Thorin staring into a pool of bad CGI gold while quotes from the previous movies play. In this case I think "show don't tell" means these emotional moments deserved scenarios/full scenes involving interactions with other characters over close-ups and overlayed dialogue. There are two moments that gave me serious chills at the beginning of the film: 1)
"Welcome my sister's sons, to the kingdom of Erebor", beautifully spoken line combined with a wide shot of Thorin raising his arms like a wraith (or a dragon) over his piles of gold
, 2)
When a madness-addled Thorin confronts Bilbo about something in his hand, and when Bilbo reveals it is only a walnut, you visibly see Thorin return to his old self, smiling bright as day...until a few moments later, when he's informed of guests to his keep. The play of emotions across Thorin's face was wonderful and terrifying.
Other than those, the film's attempts at emotional contact with the audience fell flat on me, with a possible exception of Bilbo's "look the eagles have come" moment, but YMMV, and to build on something said in the film,
"death is cheap"
.

I don't feel Thorin and Bilbo's relationship got enough expansion on the material from the first film even with both the second and third films put together, and they're the only two characters I think anyone cares about in an emotional investment sense. Thorin's descent is cheapened, and the film attempts to
resurrect him into an Aragorn-style hero
, but because the scene in which this happens is so poorly done it feels just as abrupt as his original hair-trigger change in DOS. IIRC the book does not offer much leeway in its depiction of Thorin, but since most of the events in the film were made up for the sake of having a third movie anyway, I feel it could have safely deviated on the matter.

Overall pretty entertaining, but maybe not something I feel compelled to watch in the theater a second time.

PS Tip for any Hollywood producers reading this thread: having contacts that don't allow the actor's pupils to naturally constrict and dilate makes them look weird.
 
kingocfs said:
Last Middle Earth movie, of course I'll be there. Also need my annual HFR fix.
Click to expand...

Last you say? we can remake the LOTR trilogy for the next generation! We can dvide the fellowship into 5 parts. The Two Towers into 7 parts. Of course we wouldn't wanna rush The return of the King... 10 parts!
 
Just finished watching DoS EE (first time seeing EE) and am ready for this tomorrow. Only had seen DoS once prior and it was much, much better the second time around. God damn is that long with the extra time added in.

Some dumb parts here and there but I think I was maybe too harsh on the first two movies the first time around, they both held up much better this past week than I expected.

Going to a showing with the company tomorrow and I hope to hell it isn't HFR, that contributed greatly to my negative impression of DoS.
 
I quite liked. Went in without a lot of expectations so I was able to enjoy the ride. I was even able to enjoy the genious that is
Alfrid and he became my favourite character. I was glad that he was (apparently) able to make it out alive and rich.

One of the major thing that rubbed me wrong was
the Aragorn reference in the end.
Totally unnecessary. And those
dune worms suddenly appearing was like WTF. If they have those, why wouldn't they go right into the mountain?

Teared up quite a bit in the end. End scene was perfect.
 
Posting again what I said in the spoiler thread, just got back from a marathon of all 3

3D and effects were much, much better than the first 2 IMO. I felt like I also got to see more "real" landscapes instead of pure CGI (though there are still a shitload of CGI)

I laughed out loud at the copy/paste elf soldiers from the trailer.

Richard Armitage was amaaaazing and I loved the character moments with him and the others. I'm kind of sad there was so much action but I guess it had to live up to the title.

Thought the film started off quite well but there was wayyyyy too much Legolas. Seriously the 2nd half of the movie was like The Adventures of Legolas a superhero show starring Legolas. Add in the Tauriel and Azog stuff and to be honest I felt like I was watching LOTR fanfic at times instead of an adapation of The Hobbit. Oh and that ending where Thranduil tells Legolas "Go North, seek out the Strider". OH YEAH ARAGORN RIGHT WE GET IT THIS IS A PREQUEL!!

That said most of the battles were quite enjoyable and the ending was pretty nicely done too (though no one seemed to grieve for Fili or we just didn't see it)

I think it was best of the trilogy (I'd give the first two somewhere from a 6.5-7 and this one a touch higher, maybe 7.5/8. Far from the heights of LOTR but a very fun time. The less you compare it to the book or previous movies the better
 
bengraven said:
Anyone want a fun to read article that won't make them angry?

The Hobbit: How the 'clomping foot of nerdism' destroyed Tolkien's dream - and the fantasy genre



TL;DR - The Hobbit should have shaped fantasy today, but the boring as all fuck worthless tree-killing waste of paper LOTR did - and killed the genre by making every modern fantasy novel an encyclopedia with dialogue.
TL:DR #2 - also, nerds are nerdy
Click to expand...

This is actually a pretty awesome article. I think it's basically on point regarding modern fantasy. This is the same type of criticism I have with A Song of Fire and Ice and Wheel of Time. What fucking story actually requires 7+ 1,000 page books?

Obviously, the fan base wants the encyclopedia and they sell well.
 
Trailers: We got unbroken (angelina jolie and zamperini snippets), star wars (didn't know it was in 3d - pleasant surprise), Jurassic world, the walk (jgl + zemeckis), Jupiter ascending, and like 5 other trailers I can't remember.
 
bengraven said:
Anyone want a fun to read article that won't make them angry?

The Hobbit: How the 'clomping foot of nerdism' destroyed Tolkien's dream - and the fantasy genre



TL;DR - The Hobbit should have shaped fantasy today, but the boring as all fuck worthless tree-killing waste of paper LOTR did - and killed the genre by making every modern fantasy novel an encyclopedia with dialogue.
TL:DR #2 - also, nerds are nerdy
Click to expand...
That was a great read, and it mirrors my thoughts on the subject pretty well (I particularly liked the parallels he drew with religious discussion, an angle I have not thought of before).

But who am I to judge, people seem to get great enjoyment from that stuff.
 
I liked it. Probably my favorite of the hobbit trilogy, though id like to rewatch the first two again, only watched them once.

Can't wait for the inevitable fan edit that condenses the three films into two or one. That should be great.
 
Saw it, hated it. Not too surprised since I disliked the last film as well. Most of my issues have been said in this thread already, and I don't feel like making a wall of negative text. I'm sort of amazed that the same guy who made LOTR made this. There is a such a stark difference in quality. I hope Jackson does something interesting after this.
 
Anth0ny said:
I liked it. Probably my favorite of the hobbit trilogy, though id like to rewatch the first two again, only watched them once.

Can't wait for the inevitable fan edit that condenses the three films into two or one. That should be great.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I actually look forward to these.

Favourite for me is Desolation of Smaug, but An Unexpected Journey has the songs that I like (Misty Mountains, That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates)
 
Quick said:
Enjoyed it, but I really thought Smaug's bit should've been included in Desolation of Smaug.
Click to expand...

Definitely. Thinking back, it really feels like they chopped the last 30 minutes off Smaug and pasted it into the beginning of this one. Really weird decision there.
 
Yet again, a sole woman and a vast focus on her almost ruined a movie... first Spiderman, now The Hobbit. That fucking 'love' talk and dwarf <> legolas <> redhead triangle are so fucking cringe worthy... I faced palmed so hard in the cinema.

edit:
Saw the movie in IMAX HFR 3D and it was a blast visually. CGI works sooooooo much better here.
 
Zukuu said:
Yet again, a sole woman and a vast focus on her almost ruined a movie... first Spiderman, now The Hobbit. That fucking 'love' talk and dwarf <> legolas <> redhead triangle are so fucking cringe worthy... I faced palmed so hard in the cinema.
Click to expand...

I ain't even mad at this point, because Evangeline Lily.
 
Beside myself with sadness tonight at not being able to see this on opening day :'( I was really gunning for a showing tonight with my friends, but it just didn't pan out. I guess I'll just mope around until I get to see it on Friday :( I can't believe it, I feel let down and left out and just all around disappointed.

(blah blah im grumpy and tired)

That being said, I NOW LITERALLY cannot wait to see this movie, and now all my friends and I have to work out is how to smuggle in the "Joy and Sorrow" mead she started brewing for this very movie when AUJ came out! Also bring enough tissues to cry into, oh god :(
 
Just got home from seeing it.

By the time Return of the King ended and the credits rolled, I was genuinely choked up and emotional; I felt like I had been on this incredible journey with these characters I had come to know over the years, and that journey had come to an end that was warm and heartfelt and bittersweet and well-earned.

When Battle of the Five Armies ended, I felt... relief, maybe? Like, "it's over."

I don't want anyone to take that the wrong way, because I did enjoy this movie. Some great set pieces, nice visuals, moments that made me smile -- and I was smiling at the end, when it comes full circle. Action in spades, and perhaps one of my favorite "duel" scenes in years.

But I never connected with any of these characters in the way I did with the cast of the first films, with the tenuous exception of Bilbo, and when all those "emotional" beats occurred they just didn't resonate.

It was just... over, and I wasn't particularly moved by that.
 
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