Review: "The Hobbit III: Well, I Guess That's It"

Warner Bros. Pictures

Going to see The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies was a weird experience for me.  I kept thinking back to seeing the Lord of the Rings movies in theaters when I was young.  I was probably one of the last people to read the books before the movies came out; I remember skimming through the appendices on the drive up to the theater.  I was so invested in those movies.  As The Return of the King approached, I was filled with a mix of emotions: anticipation for the coming movie experience, sadness that this would be the last cinematic journey to Middle Earth, excitement at the prospect of seeing the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, speculation about what things from the book would get included and what things wouldn't (I'm still sad that Prince Imrahil was cut out, but I'm not so disappointed with the exclusion of the Drúadan Forest as my 14-year-old self was).

I felt nothing when I went to see the final film in the Hobbit trilogy.  The previous two film had done nothing to make me excited for it, nothing to make me look forward to seeing all my favorite parts from the book on the big screen.  Heck, I barely remember the first movie, and I only remember the second because I wrote that barely positive review of it about a year ago.  I went into this movie with low expectations, because all the previous two movies had done was train me to lower them.  I did have hope, of a sort.  I hoped that because the second movie had been a bit better than the first, that this movie would be a bit better than the second.

[SPOILERS!  SPOILERS LURK BELOW!  Also, some swearing.]

SMAUG THE TERRIBLE and the anticlimactic action scene

Warner Bros. Pictures

The first part of this movie, which should have actually been the climax of the previous movie, failed to grab me at all.  Smaug the Terrible is attacking Lake-Town!  This should be totally awesome!  But it falls completely flat.  Maybe it would have been cooler if it had been less than a year between when I saw The Hobbit II and when I saw The Hobbit III, but as it was I was just thrust into the climax of a movie with no build up whatsoever and the movie never found a way to make me give a single shit.

As the movie opens, Stephen Fry and his sidekick, Cowardly Boot-Licking Unibrow Man, are escaping from Lake-Town while spouting comically* villainous lines like, "Don't save the people, save the gold!" and "I hate poor people and love gold!" and "I am comically villainous!  Look how I value gold over human life!"

*Imagine that every instance of the word "comically" in this review has sarcastic quotation marks around it, because there is only one successful instance of humor in the entire movie.  

Our hero, Bard the Bowman (and make no mistake, Bard is the hero of this movie - it may say 'The Hobbit' in the title, but Bilbo doesn't do jack in it) is in jail for reasons I've forgotten and can't be bothered to look up.  The jail is in a bridge over the canal, probably inspired by the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.

Bridge of Sighs - Photo Credit: Me

Bard breaks out of prison using the strength of Stephen Fry's neck and the forward momentum of a slow-moving gondola, leaving me wondering why Peter Jackson seems to hate his audience so much.  He then grabs a bow and arrows and runs to the highest point in town to shoot at Smaug, but soon realizes that he can't pierce Smaug's natural armor, which he should know, because he was just talking about that in the previous movie.

Meanwhile, Tauriel is apparently still in Lake-Town for reasons I've forgotten and can't be bothered to look up.  She is leading Bard's family to safety via slow-moving gondola.  Bard's son sees a man shooting at the dragon, realizes only his father could be so stupid, and runs to bring him the Black Arrow, which is, as they both know, the only arrow that can pierce Smaug's hide.  As Tauriel makes absolutely no effort to stop him, the little kid runs off into the burning city to find his father.  Will he make it safely through the fire and the crush of panicked people to... Oh, yep, he got there quickly and safely.  Good for him.

I'd like to point out that at NO TIME are any of the characters more than moderately inconvenienced by the HUGE FUCKING DRAGON BURNING THE CITY TO ASHES AROUND THEM.

Warner Bros. Pictures

The burning city always feels like a greenscreen backdrop, not like the world that the characters are inhabiting and acting in.  And Smaug lacks any weight or sense of scale.  We needed more human-level views of the action, where the city feels like a real place and Smaug feels like a HUGE FUCKING DRAGON and a real threat, instead of sweeping, flying, dragon-eye views where the city feels insignificant and unpopulated and Smaug feels like just another thing on the screen because there's no sense of scale.  I guess what I'm saying is that I wish The Battle of the Five Armies were more like Godzilla.

Warner Bros. Pictures

So Bard's bow gets broken, and he has to construct a makeshift ballista to fire the Black Arrow, which he does by just shoving the broken halves of the bow into some burnt wood and resting the arrow on the back of his son.  Why?  Why does Peter Jackson hate me so much?

Smaug, meanwhile, has stopped flying around and breathing fire so that he can slowly walk toward Bard while taunting him with bad dialogue.  Instead of, say, flying over him and roasting him to a crisp, like the HUGE FUCKING DRAGON he is.

Every once in a while the camera cuts away to Bilbo and the dwarves just chilling on a cliff and going, "Huh, I guess Smaug is burning everything.  Oh, I guess he's dead now."  Which, strangely enough, is exactly how I was reacting too.

Warner Bros. Pictures

KING BARD and the cowardly boot-licking unibrow man

Blame Warner Bros. Pictures

Oh boy, everyone's favorite character, Cowardly Boot-Licking Unibrow Man is back!  By now, it is sadly apparent that this guy, whose name I've forgotten and can't be bothered to look up, will be the film's ongoing comic relief.

Sigh.

Sssssssiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

My problem with the character is not that he is loathsome.  He was intended to be loathsome.  My problem is that his entire character is a one-note joke that is entirely too obvious and dumb to be funny, yet is stretched out and revisited throughout the movie like it's a goddamn comedy goldmine.

Anyways, Stephen Fry is dead, and everyone looks to Bard for leadership.  "King Bard!" cries Cowardly Boot-Licking Unibrow Man and absolutely no one else for some reason.  Bard refuses the offer of kingship, because he's having some sort of 'learn-to-accept-your-position-as-leader' story arc forced on him.  Alright, that's a pretty straight-forward, if clichéd, way of giving some more depth to his character.  Unfortunately, this story arc is more of a story line, because it is never developed and there is no payoff.  Bard continues to lead the people of Lake-Town while occasionally half-assedly claiming not to be their leader, and then he disappears from the film once Bilbo leaves.  Bard's driving motivation throughout the film seems to be saving his family, because they are constantly in danger.  Over and over again.  Not just the removed but existential threat of 'if I don't do this thing, my family will die' (like in another much better film that came out last year, Interstellar),  but the direct threat of 'Oh, another monster is menacing my daughters with a sword again, I'd better ride this cart down a staircase at it!'

Blame Warner Bros. Pictures

Seriously, he rides a rickety wooden bad-CGI cart down a stone staircase and crashes into a bad-CGI ogre or troll or whatever.  In the process he actually drives the cart right over his cowering daughters while Peter Jackson turns to the camera and flips off the audience.

As a side-note, some of the musical cues seem wrong.  I first noticed it when Bard was talking about something on the shore of the lake, and there was this sweeping epic Lord of the Rings-ish music that felt really out of place.  It happened during some of the other conversations or speeches later in the movie as well.  The music doesn't seem to match what is happening, and it almost feels like it's trying to drown out the words so you can't tell that the dialogue is poorly written.  Ah-ah-ah, Howard Shore, you can't trick me into thinking I'm watching something as good as LotR just by adding random musical swells!

And seriously, why does everyone keep trusting Cowardly Boot-Licking Unibrow Man?  He has done nothing to earn anyone's trust.  In fact, everything he does seems specifically designed to make no one trust him.  And yet Bard and Gandalf and probably some other people keep entrusting him with important tasks and acting surprised or disappointed when he fails at them.  It makes the characters I'm supposed to be rooting for seem like idiots.

THE WHITE COUNCIL and the badass wizard fight!

Warner Bros. Pictures

Oh man, this is totally awesome!  Look, it's Gandalf and Saruman and Radagast and Galadriel and Elrond all fighting the Necromancer and the Nazgûl!  Crazy, trippy magic stuff is happening all around!  ...Oh, it's over.

The White Council's battle with the Necromancer at Dol Guldur was one of the major selling points to me for the idea of doing the Hobbit as several movies covering the broader Quest for Erebor.  The brief mention of it in the book left me wanting to know more.  If there was anything I was excited to see in The Hobbit III, it was this.

And with the very low expectations I had set for myself based on the previous two movies, I wasn't disappointed.  In fact, at this point I actually started to get into the movie.

However, this scene could definitely have been done better.  As expected with these Hobbit movies, a lot of the action was done in bad CGI.  Sadly, this extended to a lot of the magic stuff going on, and at times I couldn't quite tell if something seemed weird because it was magic or because it was bad CGI.  On that note, Galadriel, although totally badass, reprised my least favourite effect from Fellowship of the Ring.

Yep, that's the one.                                                                 Warner Bros. Pictures

And Radagast was there, being goofy looking and riding that damned rabbit-sled.  Radagast used to be one of my favorite characters in Middle Earth before the Hobbit movies came out.  He was just so mysterious as you only get a little glimpse of him in the books.  But now I guess he's a goofy, drug-addled, rabbit-riding guy covered in bird shit.

My main problem with this partly awesome scene, though, is that this is the only White Council stuff in the whole movie.  Like Smaug at Lake-Town, the whole build-up to it has been lost in the gap between movies, and it feels like it should be the climax to another movie instead of a scene in this one.  In fact, I am thinking more and more that, if the Quest for Erebor had to be done in three movies, they should have been three parallel but self-contained movies: The Hobbit, Bard the Bowman, and The White Council.

LEGOLAS AND TAURIEL - adventures in love and geography

Warner Bros. Pictures

Legolas is at Lake-Town too, and he seems really anxious to leave.  He keeps telling Tauriel, "Hey, you can't fall in love with a dwarf, dummy!  Let's GTFO," but then they just keep sorta hanging around.  Some point after Legolas tells Tauriel that they need to leave, Bard is walking around having problems and he just sort of bumps into Legolas, who is just standing there staring at the horizon.  Instead of saying, "Oh yeah, I was just leaving, wasn't I?" he starts giving Bard advice about ruling.  Why does Legolas care?  Legolas is supposed to be an asshole.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Hey, remember last year when I said:

I was not sure if I would like Tauriel, but it turns out I really did.  She doesn't seem like a character made up out of whole cloth and stuffed awkwardly into the movie just so that there would be a female character.  She seems fully-realized and actually interesting (perhaps the most interesting elf in the movies, along with Thranduil).  I can even kinda see the love triangle they've got going on.  It is decidedly non-Tolkien, but that's okay; if you take elves off the high pedestal that Tolkien created them on, they get more interesting. 

That no longer holds true.  Here's what I thought might happen in this movie: Legolas loves Tauriel and Tauriel knows that a marriage to the king's son offers her the standing and acceptance she could never have as a mere Silvan elf.  But Tauriel's nascent feelings for Kili and her desire to protect the elven kingdom through direct intervention prompt her to run off to help the dwarves.  Legolas pursues her but only reaches her in time to see her get killed trying to defend Kili.  Legolas, thinking she had thrown her life away for the love of a dwarf, is disgusted and gains a deep mistrust of dwarves, setting up his character in the Lord of the Rings and making his eventual strong friendship with Gimli more impressive (even though that friendship wasn't terribly well-explored in the films).  Kili, meanwhile, has much stronger feelings for the fallen Tauriel, and throws himself at the orcs who killed her in a berserker rage, killing many of them but eventually succumbing to his wounds.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Here's what actually happened: Kili and Tauriel profess their love for eachother.  Legolas just sort of hangs around Tauriel the whole movie and occasionally says stuff like, "Hey, loving a dwarf is dumb," but other than that his character doesn't seem too invested in it.  Tauriel, meanwhile, has been banished from the elven kingdom, presumably for leaving the kingdom against the express orders of Thranduil, but the movie treats it like she's been banished because she loves a dwarf for some reason.  Then some stuff happens and Kili dies and Tauriel is sad and wants to bury him.  Then Thranduil gives her some sort of talk about love and feelings.  As my fiancée aptly pointed out at this point: "There's no way Thranduil would give a quarter of a shit about her emotions."  Heck, what was Thranduil even doing there up on that frozen crag?  Wasn't he supposed to be leading an army of elves?

Warner Bros. Pictures

The previous movie made me like Tauriel and even accept the weird love triangle thing.  In this movie, her character didn't do anything, and all the payoff from the love triangle was stupid.  Tauriel's character was reduced to one point in a flat love triangle where nothing interesting happened.

But enough about love, let's talk about geography.*

*I say this more often than you might think.

At some point, for some reason I've forgotten and can't be bothered to look up, Legolas and Tauriel decide to run off to Mount Gundabad to do some scouting, and Legolas says something like, "We must go north to Mount Gundabad!"  Wait, Mount Gundabad is north?  North is the Lonely Mountain and then the Withered Heath (whence came the Great Worms).  Mount Gundabad is in the Misty Mountains, on the other side of Mirkwood.  Last I checked, that meant west.  Let's take a look at a map:

That red line runs from where Legolas was to Mount Gundabad.  Gundabad is technically north, in the same way that Seattle is north of Chicago, but most of that distance is pretty clearly western.  Notice also that that line is about the same distance that Thorin's party crossed in the entire previous movie, and Legolas and Tauriel are just going to jog there and back?  The Lord of the Rings films did an incredible job of giving this world a sense of scale.  Half of those movies were just helicopter shots of people walking over cool landscapes with swelling heroic music!  But now, characters are just hopping across half a continent between scenes.  They ride there and back again like it's no big deal.

Warner Bros. Pictures

While at Mount Gundabad, they see a bunch of giant bats, and Legolas says, "These bats are bred for one purpose."  And Tauriel actually asks, "What?" like Legolas is going to say "Parties!"  It's fucking war, you idiot.  Everything is bred for war.  You thought the uruk hai were special, LotR viewers? Nope, every bloody thing in this movie is bred for war.  Heck, war would have been a good guess anyways because the word war makes up roughly 15% of the script.  If someone made a supercut of all the times someone dramatically says 'war' in this movie, it would be half and hour long.

Anyways, then they see the orc and goblin army march out of Mount Gundabad (which is also the least menacing and most half-assed evil fortress in all of these movies, in terms of design), and a bunch of goblins start running out ahead of the army.  What, are they going to run all the way to Erebor?  Apparently yes, and so do Legolas and Tauriel.

Why, Peter Jackson?  What did I ever do to deserve this?

The Battle of the Five Armies

Warner Bros. Pictures

This is another part where the movie managed to grab me and my low expectations.  Some of the battle was pretty well done, lacking some of the more egregiously bad and cartoony effects that the Hobbit trilogy is unfortunately synonymous with.  The dwarf shield wall was pretty cool.  Billy Connolly was pretty cool.  The elves were pretty cool.  Thranduil and his megaloceros were pretty cool.  I liked the concept of having catapults mounted on the backs of trolls (but those catapults would not at all be functional; they look like they combine design elements of mangonels and trebuchets without any of the working functionality of either).

Warner Bros. Pictures

I liked the troll with the battering ram on his head that ran up and smashed the gates, then fell over (that's the one successful use of humor I mentioned in the movie).

But pretty soon, the movie lost me again.

Hey, you know what I would have liked to see more of in this movie?  The battle of the five armies.  You know, the title of the film?  Pretty early on, the men of the lake retreat to Dale and have their own fight there, and eventually the dwarves of Thorin's party go up to some distant spire to fight some other orcs there, and the whole big battle thing is pretty much abandoned by the movie.  I guess all the fighting dwarves and orcs and elves just sort of hang out and wait for the camera to come back to them.

I ended up having a few problems with what little of the actual battle they showed.  For one thing, I never got a sense of where the men of Lake-Town are in the battle and what they are doing (for the brief time they actually participate in the battle).  Maybe they were in some of the wide shots, but we never get a human-eye view of the fighting from their perspective.  When they retreat to Dale, I can't figure out why.  The fighting's barely started, and the camera isn't showing enough of it to give the audience a sense of how things are going for either side.  It doesn't seem like they are being too hard-pressed by the orcs - in fact, after the men retreat, the elves and dwarves keep fighting at the same spot for most of the rest of the movie.  Tactically, it is pretty much the worst thing they could have done.  By all rights they should have been cut down by the orcs as they fled, yet somehow they made it to Dale alright.  And that served only to divide the forces of Good against the "overwhelming" forces of Evil.  Bard's actions here should probably have gotten all the good guys killed.

But I know why they did it.  Filming a battle in a city is a lot easier than filming a big pitched battle in a field, because the action can be broken up among a number of small set pieces, like Bard riding a cart into the troll from Harry Potter.

Back to the battle.  Why do the elves jump out in front of the shield wall?  That defeats the purpose.  Why not circle around the flanks?  And then the dwarves break the shield wall too.  Do you guys even know what a shield wall is for?

So, how did the orcs control the Sand Worms?  And why didn't they use them to drill a hole right into Erebor and win instantly?  Or right into Minas Tirith?  Seriously, when you're making prequels, don't put stuff in them that would have been useful in the original trilogy.

Warner Bros. Pictures

I like the signal thing that the orcs are using.  But when did they set that up?  And doesn't it require the orcs look away from the enemy every time the horn sounds?  Also, Azog doesn't seem like a lead-from-behind kind of general.

There's a bit where some of the women of Lake-Town are like, "Hey, we're going to go fight too!" and they try to recruit a random old woman that turns out to be everyone's favorite character, Cowardly Boot-Licking Unibrow Man!  As usual, it's an incredibly poor attempt at humor.  But then we never see those spear-maidens again, and the audience is left to realize, "Oh, that wasn't supposed to be an empowering female moment, that was just the set up for a joke about how Cowardly Boot-Licking Unibrow Man is cowardly.  Look everyone, even women are braver than him!  Look, he's cross-dressing! Laugh now!

But even if they had shown more of the spear-maidens, wouldn't that have retroactively made Eowyn's character less remarkable?

Oh, one more note on geography.  Before the battle, Gandalf says something like, "The orcs want to capture the Lonely Mountain because it is the gateway to the Kingdom of Angmar which they want to rebuild."  No.  Let's take a look at that map again:

Angmar is highlighted in green, Erebor in red

Erebor is nowhere near Angmar.  Angmar is on the other side of the Misty Mountains.  You know what's the gateway to Angmar?  Mount Fucking Gundabad!  Jesus, Peter Jackson, you know there's a map at the start of every book, right?

THE CLIMAX

Warner Bros. Pictures.

Meanwhile, Bilbo and Thorin and the other dwarves are hanging out in the Lonely Mountain.  You remember them, right?  The supposed main characters of this trilogy?  It's possible you don't, because  despite being drawn out over nine hours, no effort has been expended trying to define each dwarf's character for the audience.  By the end of these three movies, I can name maybe three of these dwarves by sight.

I bet you didn't even realize that not all the dwarves are in this picture.              Warner Bros. Pictures

Anyways, Thorin is going crazy from gold sickness.  Throughout the series, they are pretty inconsistent about this gold sickness.  Does it just come from hanging around a bunch of gold?  Did Thorin inherit it from his grandfather, King Thrór?  Does the Arkenstone cause it or make it worse?  Gandalf even says something about Smaug causing it, even though Thrór clearly had the gold sickness before Smaug came.

Some of the dwarves whose names I've forgotten and can't be bothered to look up go up to Thorin one by one and explain how he's tearing them apart with his gold-dementia.  Bilbo does too.  Thorin is not swayed by his friends' repeated interventions, but he is swayed by hearing it all over again echoing in his head in a cliched and uninteresting manner during a bad-CGI gold-madness-induced hallucination that lasts longer than the should-have-been-epic wizard battle at the beginning of the movie.  Shouldn't this kind of big, plot-moving, character-changing stuff take place through character interaction and not weird flashback hallucinations?

So the battle is raging and Thorin is holed up in his halls, brooding.  Dain keeps going, "Gosh,we sure could use Thorin's help here in this battle that's totally still going on!" like thirteen dwarves will make a real difference.  But then Thorin's company charges into battle (having first removed all their probably really helpful dwarven armor) and it turns out thirteen dwarves really do change the tide of battle!  They change it so much that Thorin and his company are able to charge right through all the orcs and up onto that craggy little spire that Azog is chilling on.  And as soon as they get up there (to the place that Azog was directing the battle from, remember), suddenly it's all foggy and you can't see the battle at all from there.  Also, there is a frozen waterfall that I'm pretty sure wasn't there before.

But oh, I guess it was a trap?  ...to lead the dwarves up onto that mountain... because Bolg was going to be leading his army... right up that huge, spindly spire?  That makes no sense, but sure, why not, let's get this movie over with.

So the dwarves are up there and some goblins come running up and one of them says, "Goblin mercenaries.  No more than a hundred.  We'll be fine."

1. How are they mercenaries?  Aren't they fighting in an army of orcs and goblins?  Are they, like, some company of goblins that is only in it for the gold?
2. Two dwarves don't feel threatened by 100 goblins?  The movie just told me not to care about the action anymore.
3. And it's okay, because I'm pretty sure we don't even see the rest of that fight.

Then the other dwarves take a page out of Scooby-Doo and "Split up to cover more ground."  This obviously leads to one of their deaths.

Stealing a trick right out of Peter Jackson's King Kong, Legolas grabs hold of a passing bat and flies on up to where the dwarves are.  So... I guess they were bred for war and convenient transportation.  Somehow he ends up upside-down, which is the moment he decides to sheathe his daggers.  Neither his daggers nor his arrows fall out of his quiver while he's hanging upside down, and Peter Jackson makes his second cameo appearance where he just faces the camera and flips the audience off, this time with both hands.

Warner Bros. Pictures

Legolas just perches atop something for a while and shoots arrows everywhere, but then he sees Tauriel in need of saving and he reaches back to find he's out of arrows!  Haha!  That's so awesome!  Okay, this is actually the second time that this movie has succeeded at humor!  Sadly, on reflection, it doesn't seem as cool because we've already seen the exact same gag in The Avengers.

Also, Legolas running out of arrows has no effect on things because the orc takes a really damn long time to deliver his coup de grâce to Tauriel, giving Legolas the chance he needs to get down off his perch, jump on a troll that has flails for hands and morningstars for feet and a chain running through its eyeholes (what is this, 300?), use that troll to knock over a stone tower, and then run across the fallen tower and attack the orc.  Alright, I guess.  It's not the most ridiculous thing Legolas has ever done.  But then he has a whole extended fight sequence with this orc on top of and inside this sideways tower.  That's not how buildings work!  That tower should have collapsed immediately.  Then, as the tower finally does crumble, Legolas just runs up the falling stone blocks in midair.  Fuck.  Right.  Off.

Plus, I'm pretty sure the orc he is fighting is Bolg, who, as I discussed last time, should have been the main orc villain of this story but has been relegated to second-tier status because Peter Jackson stole Azog from a much cooler story.  My main problem with Bolg here, though, is that he just has chunks of metal sticking out of him.  That's not armor.  That's, like, the opposite of armor!  He doesn't look terrifying, he looks the the victim of an industrial accident!

Blame Warner Bros. Pictures

Hey, what happened to the battle?  Wasn't there a whole second army of orcs coming to kill everyone?  Oh, I guess the eagles took care of that other army.  Whew!  For a second I thought I might have to worry about any of the threats in this movie.  At this point, Beorn para-drops in just to remind me about how horribly they fucked up Beorn in the previous movie.

Blame Warner Bros. Pictures

Thorin's fight with Azog has absolutely no energy.  It is the stupidest, most anticlimactic thing I've ever witnessed on screen.  After they wail on each other for a while, they somehow end up out on the unexplained frozen river.  Azog has smashed the ice away in a circle around them with his stupidly large flail because he doesn't mind his surroundings, so Thorin just sort of hands the flail to Azog and steps off the ice, causing Azog to slip into the water and die like a chump.  Ugh.  But wait, he's not actually dead! He floats under the ice for a bit, then jumps up out of the water, through the ice, and fights Thorin for another couple seconds before actually dying.  And Peter Jackson shows up a third time to flip off the audience and say, "See, Legolas isn't the only one who can completely ignore the laws of physics to do stupid shit!"

Why couldn't Thorin and the other dead dwarves have died in battle, not in some stupid fight very far removed from the battle because battle scenes are expensive and difficult to film and they accidentally centered this film on a movie-length battle?  It robs their deaths of any gravitas by tying them not to an epic battle, but to a goofy over-choreographed CGI fight scene.

WELL, I GUESS THAT'S IT

Well at least this stupid-ass scene from the trailer didn't make it into the theatrical cut.                   Warner Bros.

The battle of the several armies is over, Bard and Dain have disappeared, probably to resurface in the extended edition, some of the dwarves whose names I've forgotten and can't be bothered to look up are dead now.  Gandalf apparently knows Legolas for some reason.  Thranduil tells Legolas to go hang out with baby Strider, which I am not okay with.  Seriously, aside from how stupid that is, Aragorn is only 11 years old at this point, and people probably don't call him Strider.  So Bilbo thinks it's finally time to go home.

So he does, uneventfully.

He finds his house and its contents are being auctioned off, and everyone at the auction is dressed like extras in Munchkinland, which is really jarring when compared to the look at Hobbiton we get at the beginning of Fellowship.  Bilbo sits down to write his book, and the movie ends by reminding the audience of a much better movie trilogy they could have been watching.

It's sad to compare how invested I was in the Lord of the Rings movies with how uninvested I am in these ones.  This move made me feel nothing.  I was so sad at the end of Return of the King, knowing that the story was over and there would never be another movie set in Middle Earth.  As the credits rolled at the end of Hobbit III, I just thought, "Well, I guess that's it."

Do I recommend The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies?  Sure, why not?  I recommended fucking Snow White and the Huntsman, didn't I?  (though in my defense, I only recommended that because it had striking visuals and much better production values than the script deserved; this movie, on the other hand, has a much worse script  and production values than it deserved)  Go see The Hobbit III if you want to.  It's kind of fun, and it's not as bad as the Star Wars prequels.  But really, this movie just failed to make me care at all about it.  And that makes me sadder than any character death that happened in the film.

Why would you do something like this, Peter Jackson?  Why?

"Ain't I a stinker?"

-your gundaworse d20 despot