When The Dark Knight Rises was released upon us many said they felt that Christopher Nolan mentally checked out and didn't put his all into the last film. I didn't see that personally. While it wasn't as good as The Dark Knight, and while it had some significant holes in the plot I still thought it was a good movie, one I enjoyed immensely. However I then started to wonder what that would look like on screen, a movie put out by a director who has mentally moved on to other projects but has yet finished the one he or she was currently working on. I now know what that looks like all too well. It looks like The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. I have no idea what Peter Jackson's next project is (according to IMDB it's The Adventures of Tin Tin: Prisoners of the Sun) but The Five Armies looked so bad that Jackson's mind had to have been on Tin Tin the majority of the time. The film looked to be nothing more than a two and a half hour advertisement of Jackson's special effects department Weta Workshop and the computer program they used to create the battle sequences. The acting was laughable, the dialogue was worse, and the movie never got going, it just spun its wheels.
All of the actors that were in the far superior second film, The Desolation of Smaug are back in this one so I won't get into the cast. Howard Shore has returned to offer up his magic on the score but after five movies of the same sound and very little new melodies or themes, the music feels stale. Somehow John Williams has been able to keep that from happening to his scores for the Star Wars franchise and while the score for Desolation was impressive, the music wore thin this time around. And for a movie filmed entirely on location in places like Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire in the UK along with time spent in Pinewood studios the actors seemed to have spent most of their time running around in front of green screens. It felt like practical film making went right out the window. There was nothing impressive about the cinematography and there should have been since this was as the tagline states, "The Final Chapter". The Five Armies should have been a grand spectacle instead of being a disappointing one. It should have taken your breath away instead of making you yawn. It should have made you float out the theater instead of making you run so you could get to the restroom.
Peter Jackson is a good director and if you watch The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring films in order you'll see that firsthand, and that's what I suggest you do. That way by the time you get to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers the sour aftertaste of this movie would have long been washed away. Peter Jackson seemingly gave a fuck doing the LOTR films and he seemed to give a fuck on An Unexpected Journey and The Desolation of Smaug, but he then seemed to check out on Five Armies and that was a damn shame because THIS was the one we were all waiting for. Watch the trailer of this film, it is far better than the film itself in almost every way and I'll see you at the theater.
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