The Hobbit

Just like Bilbo wrote of his adventure after he came back, so am I now sitting down to create an introduction for a piece already written. What’s in the past for me, now lies ahead of you. I know what I’ve put to the page here and I have to warn you, you might not like it. But I’d encourage you to read on anyways or maybe even because of this. I’m not here to change your opinion. You can like, what you like, but I do believe that hearing someone else‘s opinion, however far from your own, is beneficial. I believe in thinking about the stories we consume because that’s the only way we can expect to get better ones in the future. So no, I don’t want to change your opinion. I just want to make you think a bit and maybe you’ll find your opinion changing on its own.

And with those disclaimers out of the way, we can dive into my thoughts. I hope you haven’t forgotten your handkerchief.

The Good

Martin Freeman as Bilbo – this was a match made in heaven. Freeman is not only a great actor, but the role is basically made for him. He can be funny, he can be heroic, he can be thoughtful. My three favourite scenes in the whole trilogy showcase his mastery. The third best is his reenactment of riddles in the dark. Gollum is just the right amount of scary, Bilbo is just the right amount of freaked out of his mind. The second one would be Bilbo talking to Smaug. It shows how cunning Bilbo has become and it is the only time Smaug feels menacing. Freeman and Cumberbatch had great chemistry in BBC’s Sherlock and they recreate it here, even though one of them is a CGI dragon. My absolute favourite scene of The Hobbit is Gandalf‘s arrival into the Shire. It is funny, it is sweet and it brings back fond memories of the book. Mr. Freeman absolutely knocked it out of the park.

Bilbo and Thorin’s friendship – though not perfect, this was one of the relationships that worked for me. Both of the characters are well developed and you can clearly see Thorin begin to like Bilbo more and more. I’d like for his doubts to last a bit longer, but doing it this way creates a very cathartic ending for An Unexpected Journey.

The music – both diegetic and nondiegetic. I honestly wish they would include more. Far Over the Misty Mountains is a great (even though when I read the book as a child, I came up with a melody for the song and it bugs me to no end to hear a different one) and I even liked Blunt the Knives, but the book includes many more poems to draw from. But we’ve got, what we’ve got and what we’ve got is nice. I also appreciate the non-diegetic instrumentals, that do some heavy lifting to get the audience into the right emotional place.

Balin – he’s sweet. I love his relationships with both Bilbo and Thorin. He fits the role of the old wise mentor better than Gandalf for these movies.  

The Dwarves As Characters

This trilogy is seven hours and fifty-four minutes long. Take that number in. Almost eight entire hours. And after spending those eight hours (it was even more for me because I was stopping to take notes and rewinding confusing sequences to watch them again, often multiple times) I am not sure, what the names of half of the main characters are. I can identify seven for sure and I could probably guess the rest, but I’m a huge Tolkien nerd. I’ve read The Hobbit multiple times. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings and even The Silmarilion and this was not my first time watching the films. I can’t imagine, what it must be like for somebody who’s coming into this experience blind. I’d guess they don’t even know many of the names, never mind assigning them to the correct dwarf. And that’s a huge problem. I cannot overstate this. If you don’t have compelling characters, you don’t have a good movie. If there was one mistake, The Hobbit trilogy had to fix, it would be this one.

I’ve heard many people say: Well they’re not meant to be main characters. Sure let’s go with that. But then they’re certainly secondary characters, right? You can’t argue they’re just extras when they have the most screentime aside from Bilbo. The problem is, that they don’t even work as supporting characters. Let’s compare them with some other characters on their level you probably know. Éowyn. Faramir. Arwen. Boromir. Gollum. Denethor. When you look at this list, the dwarves look like a joke. They can’t compare in personality, depth, or realization. And mind you, we’re making comparisons to a series, whose main cast includes eight characters compared to The Hobbit’s meager three (I guess you could include Legolas as well, but he’s so narratively useless that I’d rather not). Just think of what do you really know about the dwarves.

Thorin – main character. Doesn’t count.

Balin – old, wise, loyal to Thorin, good friend, kind – that’s pretty nice

Kili – loves Tauriel and his mom – not bad, not amazing, but after this point, the quality performs a nosedive

Fili – Kili’s brother, heir to the throne

Bofur – feels homesick sometimes

Dwalin – a good fighter (which is completely irrelevant, because everybody in these movies is a superhero)

Bombur – he’s fat (yop, that’s it)

Nori, Dori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur – heh? (and you probably can’t tell them apart)

If I had asked you that same question about any of the LotR characters you could probably write me a characterization essay, so what went wrong here?

Well, as is the case with most stuff in this trilogy, the first movie does way better than the other two, but in the case of the dwarves, the differences are minimal. The issues start almost immediately, during the dinner at Bilbo’s house. We’re introduced to Balin, Dwalin, Kili, and Fili and we learn a bit about them (they’re two pairs of brothers, Dwalin is tough and rude, Balin is pleasant and polite – that sort of thing). But the rest of them come in one big group. They don’t introduce themselves, we learn nothing about them. The only time when you can hear many of their names is when Gandalf tries to count them. It’s a frantic scene with the dwarves running around and some of them not even present on the screen. If you managed to catch all the names, which itself might be difficult, since they’re all so similar, there’s no way you know which dwarf they belong to, because when Gandalf says them, there‘s the wrong dwarf on screen more often than not (if there even is one).

If a movie can’t teach me the names of its characters, it’s hard to expect it to do a better job with characterization. An Unexpected Journey at least tries to give the dwarves some personality. They do this by assigning each one a unique quirk. This method trades real depth for easy recognizability. We don’t know Ori as the youngest member of the company, who’s insecure about his abilities, but as the guy with a slingshot. It’s the easy way out, but at least we get something. But the dwarves then recieve so little time for character development, that you don’t notice many of the quirks if you’re not watching very very carefully. Did you know that Oin needs a hearing aid and he’s interested in medicine? Or that Bifur can’t speak in the common tongue and only communicates in the ancient dwarvish language? Probably not, right? But did you know, that Nori is supposed to be a mischievous thief, Ori keeps a journal of their travels and Bofur is a toymaker? Almost certainly not, because these things and many others didn’t even make it into the films. These are not hard ideas to execute, but they’re simply not given enough time. The movies try to be so many things at once that they don’t succeed in any of them. You don’t have enough time to develop your main characters? Cut the Sauron subplot. Boom! Forty minutes gained. Still not enough? Alright, cut Legolas and Gundabad. Voila – another ten to fifteen minutes. That’s an hour of screentime you could spend on developing the company‘s personalities and relationships between them. But alas, where the first movie struggles, the second doesn’t even try. The dwarves are reduced to glorified extras, used only for the occasional joke or fight. You can feel it the most in Bilbo’s final goodbye. He wants to sneak off, but Balin stops him and leads him to the gates of Erebor, where the whole company stands in warm sunlight. These are the people (well..dwarves), who he had spent the last year with. They saved each other’s lives, shared many joys, and faced many dangers together. And yet, the scene falls flat, because we, the audience, don’t know them.

What They Added

Adapting a 300-page children’s book into an epic three-movie series is obviously an incredibly difficult job. Some fans complain, that the movies don’t follow the book very closely and that they add completely new stuff. I don’t think that’s a valid complaint. They had to add new stuff because the book doesn’t have enough original stuff in it. The actual problem is what they then decided to do with the things they added. So let’s go through them one by one.

 Azog and Bolg

I feel like it’s fair to say, that Azog and Bolg can be considered new characters, even though it isn’t exactly true. Both of them technically appear in the book, but Azog gets exactly one line (…“Your grandfather Thror was killed, you remember, in the mines of Moria by Azog the Goblin -“ „Curse his name, yes,“ said Thorin…) and Bolg one-up’s him with the grand total of two lines (…Bolg of the North is coming… & …He scattered the bodyguard, and pulled down Bolg himself and crushed him…) and three mentions to his bodyguards, so their story in the movies is completely made up. The question is if it’s any good.

Let’s start with Azog because if one of them could work, it would be him. Giving the company a pursuer, who’s trying to hunt them down, is honestly quite clever. It adds a lot of narrative tension and makes a story, that is very episodic in its original form, feel more connected. Instead of the dwarves randomly bumping into different encounters, they’d be racing to get to the Mountain with orcs at their backs and the encounters could serve as obstacles in the way. And it sort of works like this. But only in the first movie.

Azog is set up as a villain well enough. Balin tells us the story of how Thorin fought him and came to his „oakenshield“ moniker. Voila – a rivalry created. Then we learn that he’s still alive, he’s searching for Thorin and this all leads to the showdown at the climax of the movie. But I can’t help, but feel, that there’s so much wasted potential with this character. The stuff that I described until now is fine, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better.

Firstly, the reveal, that Azog didn’t die in Moria, comes as a surprise to the company almost two hours into the movie, but the audience has seen him twice already at that point, so the emotional impact of that reveal is completely non-existent. I have zero ideas, why this was done, the way it was done. The two prior scenes where he appears could have easily been cut. In the first one, he kills an orc scout and puts out a bounty on the dwarves. Killing his own man shows us, how cruel he is, but we know that already. We’ve seen him kill Thorin’s dad. Killing a random orc won’t beat that. The bounty has no consequence whatsoever. I think this was supposed to be a major storyline at some point, but it probably got lost in the different cuts and edits. When the dwarves are captured in the Misty Mountains, the goblin king sends a message to Azog, a scene that would indicate, that he will receive it and catch up to the company because of this new information. But we never see the message get delivered. Azog already knows, where the dwarves are headed, and he’s waiting for them on the other side of the mountain range. The second scene is just him and his party running after the dwarves. The time these scenes occupy could have been spent differently. Maybe on some much-needed dwarf characterization or maybe on some Azog foreshadowing. Maybe show the orc scouts reporting to somebody, but don’t show his face. Let him be a menacing presence in the background. That would build up tension and mystery. The film-goer would be interested to find out, who’s hunting the company. Then you let the audience learn of Azog’s survival at the same time as the company. Show the terrified looks on the dwarves’ faces, maybe a short flashback to the fight at Moria’s gates. It creates a powerful moment for the audience, because they feel, what the characters feel, and it’d be very satisfying for the ones, that had already figured it out.

The other way, you could fix this issue would be to merge Azog and the goblin king into one character. This might be controversial with the hardcore Tolkien fans, but you’re already altering characters and creating new ones and changing the story all around the place, so why not go for it? You could say, that Azog extended his rule from Moria to the whole Misty Mountains, which would actually kind of match with the official Tolkien canon, and that he’s now residing in the goblin caves, where the dwarves run into him. This would make the element of surprise, I described earlier, even more powerful because you’d not only hear about him but actually see him. Imagine the dwarves being ambushed in the night, captured, and led into the goblin caves. The orcs throw them before a twisted throne, upon which sits a tall figure, shrouded by the shadows. Two glowing red eyes look over the captured company and a gruff voice says in the black speech: „We meet again, Thorin Oakenshield.“ How awesome would that be? It would also smooth out the rest of the movie. In the version we have now, the dwarves escape from one group of orcs, only to be then immediately found by another one, that doesn’t have any way of knowing, where they’d come out. The goblin caves have many entrances and exits, so for Azog to go straight to the right one is quite the lucky coincidence. If Azog was the ruler under the Misty mountains (pun intended), the orcs would be behind the dwarves the whole time, making their capture in the mountains more important and the story more logical on the whole. It would also make it closer to the original in a way because that’s what happens in the book.

But anyways, improvable as it may be, Azog’s arc in An Unexpected Journey works alright. As I said, the concept of a hunter is a good one and the final battle at the end of the movie is probably the best action scene in the whole trilogy. And even better, the stakes are now set up. Thorin’s archenemy is back. The dwarves might have escaped, but he’s still right behind them. The second movie even starts (ignoring the prologue) with Bilbo searching for orc scouts, that are closing in. How will the company escape this sticky situation, you ask? Well….they don’t. When he gets this close to catching them, Azog is called to Dol Guldur, where it turns out, he’s working for Sauron (don’t worry, I’ll talk about that pile of stupidity later)?! So the great decision from the first movie is immediately undone in the second. Sure, he sends Bolg after them, but Bolg doesn’t ever really fight the dwarves, he fights the elves, Legolas and Tauriel. I wasn’t intimidated by the orcs much before, but from this point on, I knew they could never cause the company any harm. Azog is mostly unimportant for the rest of the movie, and for the majority of the last one as well. He gets his final one vs one against Thorin, which is fine, but his character is underutilized and his arc is ultimately destroyed by the shoehorned in Sauron subplot.

And speaking about Bolg, let’s take a look at the other member of the family. Did you know Bolg is Azog’s son? Yeah, me neither until this rewatch because it’s mentioned exactly once. Bolg pretty much comes out of nowhere in the second movie. My guess is, that the writers decided to send Azog away and they needed somebody to take his place. But, unfortunately, Bolg can’t really fill his father’s shoes. When Azog was the hunter, you could fear for the dwarves, because he could kill them at any moment, but Bolg can‘t. We know that because killing the dwarves (and especially Thorin) is his father‘s job. The movies make sure we know that right from the get-go, making Bolg a hunter, that cannot hunt his prey. So, what does he do for five hours? He fights Legolas. Every scene of them fighting is completely useless (it only fills up the runtime) and tensionless (we’ve seen LotR, we know that Legolas survives, so, unless you’re rooting for Bolg, the fights are supremely boring). He’s killed by the elf archer at the end and his death has the same impact, as he had on the movies – none. I think you could make his death more impactful if you’d play up the father-son relationship between him and Azog. Maybe Azog’s winning the duel versus Thorin, but then he sees his son die, which sends him into a blind rage. But honestly, that would need set-up, that this trilogy really isn’t willing to do. Cutting Bolg altogether would probably be better.

The Sauron Subplot

I’ve got a little thought experiment for you. Try to summarize the Hobbit trilogy in one to two sentences. You‘ve got it? Great! Mine is: A Hobbit joins a company of dwarves and together they set out on an adventure to reclaim the dwarvish land and treasure and slay the dragon, who took it. Is yours somewhat similar? Yeah? So why the heck do we spend almost forty minutes watching Sauron?

It feels like the movies are too scared to be their own thing. The writers didn’t believe in the merits of their film, so they created this storyline, because it’s basically LotR. People see Elrond and Galadriel and Saruman fight ringwraiths and it reminds them of their love for the original trilogy. They trick people into liking the movies more by drawing on their nostalgia.

Now don’t get me wrong. The story we’re shown here isn’t bad. I liked those characters fighting Sauron the first time around. The problem is, what it does to the rest of the movies. This subplot is so out of place, that every time, we’d come back to it, I’d roll my eyes and patiently wait for it to be over. I was interested in what the company was doing, not in the White Council. It’s also kind of difficult to be excited for a story, when you know, nothing substantial is going to happen. We know that Sauron escapes, because we’ve watched LotR, and if you haven’t watched LotR, you have no reason to care about the exploits of some wizards, you don’t even know. It’s an endless circle.

And you can tell, the writers are aware of this, because of their clumsy attempt to somehow connect this subplot with the rest of the story. It’s honestly quite painful, but let’s run through the changes.

1. Gandalf was the one, who orchestrated the whole adventure because he was scared of Sauron controlling Smaug? This makes little sense and takes a lot of agency away from Thorin, making him a less impressive character. Terrible change.
2. Azog is called to Dol Guldur to lead Sauron’s army. This makes Azog useless for almost two entire movies and he has to be replaced with Bolg, who, as stated previously, sucks. Terrible change.
3. Legolas catches an orc from Bolg’s hunting party. Thranduil interrogates him and learns that Sauron is back, but does nothing about the fact. This is mostly pointless. Thranduil’s reaction doesn’t make much sense, because he can’t expect to keep Sauron at bay if the rest of the world falls, but at least it shows us how much of a selfish dick he is. Pointless change.
4. The goblin army heading to the Mountain is not the consequence of the dwarves killing their king. Sauron is sending his own because he wants the Mountain for its strategic position? I don’t know if the writers looked at the map of the Middle Earth, but I got it in my room, and let me tell you, that mountain is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I’d wager it is called „lonely“ for a reason. A clumsy attempt to connect two storylines, that have nothing to do with each other.
5. Gandalf and the rest of the White council now know, Sauron is back. This is probably the worst offender amongst the changes because it doesn’t only detract from this trilogy, it detracts from LotR as well. If I were to watch all the movies in chronological order, I’d probably think Gandalf is pretty dumb. He learns for sure, without a doubt, that Sauron has returned and yet he spends the entire first act of Fellowship researching the history of the Ring? Kinda stupid, right? And wouldn’t you expect him to check Bibo’s ring a bit sooner? He had 60 years to do so. This change makes the wise mentor character look like a complete fool and I hate it.

Legolas and Tauriel

These two are very interesting additions. They sort of come together as a package, but their roles and reasons, why they were included, are completely different.

I’m going to start with Tauriel, for she is my favourite of the two. Tauriel is a completely new character, invented for these films, and as with Azog, I think it was a good idea to add her. The Tolkien universe has long been criticized for a lack of woman characters, so why not create a badass lady elf and give her an important role in the story. Do you also want to broaden your target audience by adding a romance subplot? Sure, why not. I like a good romance. But once again the execution of this good idea has some major issues.

Tauriel’s story ultimately boils down to which one of these hot guys I’ll choose (which I find quite ironic as a response to the no women in Middle Earth complaints, but at least she kills a lot of orcs). That’s it. She’s simply not important aside from the romance aspect. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the romance is unfortunately kind of non-existent. They try to create this weird love triangle (btw Evangeline Lilly, the actress for Tauriel, literally had one request and that was not to end up in a love triangle), but she has zero chemistry with either of the two guys.

The more logical match for her is Legolas, given that they’re both elves and they know each other. We’re told that they’re kind of already a thing, but also not really. Legolas clearly likes her, but we’re never shown if she cares for him. If anything it seems she doesn’t, because when his daddy, Thranduil, says they can’t be together, she’s like oh alright, I’m going to run after that hot dwarf I met in prison then. From that point on, Legolas doesn’t ever seem like a viable option again, even when he impulsively runs after her and stands up to his father for her. He just got very gently friend zoned so we are left with Kili.

I wish this romance could work. An Elf and a dwarf. The star-crossed lovers. He sacrifices himself to save her life. There’s a powerful story hidden in there, but that’s certainly not what we get on the screen. They have two whole conversations together. Two! That is simply not enough to make me believe they’re in love. Let’s recap their time together: Tauriel saves him from a spider, but she clearly doesn’t trust him. The elves lock the dwarves up and Kili says the worst pick-up line I’ve ever heard (really, dude? I could have anything down my trousers? That’s the one you decide to… you know what? Nevermind). They have a conversation that basically boils down to stars are pretty. While the dwarves are escaping the elf realm, Tauriel saves Kili from an orc. Kili is poisoned and Tauriel comes to heal him. While in delirium, Kili babbles about Tauriel. Kili is leaving for the Mountain and asks Tauriel to come with him, but she declines. They fight Bolg together and Kili dies. That’s it. They don’t have a reason to care for each other. The ending of their story isn‘t bad, but the beginning doesn’t exist. And it wouldn’t be that difficult to do. Just have Tauriel accompany the dwarves to Laketown, maybe even the Lonely Mountain. That would give you plenty of time to develop their relationship. But we’re instead meant to believe, that they are already in love by the time they get to Laketown and that spare time is instead spent on a LotR reference (the Kingsfoil), once again exchanging nostalgia for actual substance. I’d love to watch the beautiful romance get destroyed in a terrible and emotional moment when Kili dies to Bolg while saving Tauriel, but the set-up for that moment isn’t there, so I don’t feel anything when it comes. And I would also love for Tauriel to avenge Kili’s death, but no. We’ve got another guy for that.

Legolas is absolutely useless in these movies. It’s the most egregious example of cheap LotR referencing (even though it wasn’t cheap for the studio, Orlando Bloom came away with some solid cash) and I hate every minute he’s on the screen. He simply adds nothing to the story. We learn nothing important about him or about other characters through him. He mostly fights Bolg in two championship battles for the most irrelevant character trophy. He is also a bit of a dick and racist, which makes me like his LotR version less, so thanks for that, I guess.

Alfrid

Whyyy? Just.. why? I hate Alfrid Lickspittle with burning passion. He is supposed to be a comic relief character for a trilogy, that doesn’t need more of those in my opinion, and he’s not even funny. He’s annoying in the worst way possible and they give him soooo much screen time. It feels like he occupies almost a quarter of the third movie. They could have at least used him for a moral lesson, that greed and cowardice are bad. Have him die or become a servant or something. Anything. But no, they couldn’t even manage that. The last time we see him, he’s running away, disguised as a woman, with a bosom full of gold, showing us, that greed and cowardice might not be so bad after all.

Gundabad

And last but not least, we have another addition that was expanded from one line in the book (…Then they marched and gathered by hill and valley, going ever by tunnel or under dark, until around and beneath the great mountain Gundabad of the North, where was their capital…) to a major plot point in The Battle of Five Armies and this, as basically everything in TBoFA was handled terribly. Why should we care about Gundabad? Because there’s an army coming from there. We’re told multiple times, the characters are in danger because of it. But do you know what happens with that army? Nothing. We’re told it’s almost there and then it just vanishes. The movie is so concerned with Thorin fighting Azog and Legolas, Tauriel and Kili fighting Bolg that it completely forget there was another army supposed to arrive. Legolas’s and Tauriel’s quest to inspect Gundabad is also pointless because Gandalf comes back before them with the same information, so this storyline is completely inconsequential, but at least it‘s mercifully short.

The Action Scenes

Action scenes are the worst part of all of the three movies, which is a big issue, considering how many there are. It is telling, when even in An Unexpected Journey, an otherwise solid film, most of the action just sucks and that’s because it almost universally suffers from a lack of tension.

To explain it simply: for an action scene to have tension, there has to be something at stake. A possibility that the scene goes wrong for our characters has to exist and that’s not present in these movies. There are multiple factors, that contribute to this:

1. The characters are superheroes – everybody in these movies can mow down scores of orcs on their own. And I mean everybody. From Thorin to the guy with a freaking slingshot. Once you’ve seen characters do this, you won’t be worried for them, when they get into a similar situation. This culminates, when Dwalin and Thorin literally say out loud they can easily take out hundred orcs (… „Goblin mercenaries. No more than a hundred“ „We’ll take care of them.“ …)  It is hard to create tension in your movie when your heroes can do stuff like this. Take for example the escape scene under the Misty Mountains. Gandalf frees the dwarves and now they’re running for their lives. This should be extremely tense and exciting, right? Well, wrong, because the dwarves are killing goblins as if they were flies. They’re never in any danger. The music is all grand and heroic, but for them, it’s like a walk through the park.
2. Muddy cuts – the second reason, why the action scenes lack tension, is the unclear editing. The fights have no progression, no story. They’re just a bunch of quick shots of heroes stabbing orcs. You don’t know what’s happening half the time, because the cuts are so goddamn fast. Most people’s minds will just check out, intake the series of flashy images without meaning and then turn on again once the fight is done. If you soldier through and manage to pay attention the whole time, you find out that the fights don’t even make sense. Believe me, I’ve done it. Let’s return to the escape scene. It mostly consists of blisteringly fast cuts of dwarves mowing down scores upon scores of orcs. Kili kills some orcs, Thorin stabs some orcs, Bombur survives a 10-meter fall without a scratch and smashes some orcs, Gandalf dislocates a boulder which crushes some orcs – guess what, that took approximately five seconds. But if you look closely, you can see something weird. The dwarves start as one group and then… they’re suddenly split and come back together? They run as one group for a while and then they… come together again? It makes zero sense and they try to hide in the whirlwind of quick edits.
3. Tonal problem – I have already talked about the dwarves as characters, but their lack of characterization also shows here. Only four or five of the dwarves have distinct personalities and the others are mostly there for jokes and gags, which would be fine in a comedy (even though I don’t find most of the jokes funny and I hate that most of them come from the dwarves being loud, untidy and strong-headed), but this is a fantasy adventure movie. I get the impulse to make the films funny. They‘re based on a fairy tale. The original story is fun and light-hearted, but you can’t have your main characters be these clumsy bumbling chuckleheads and then throw them into big epic fights and expect me to care for their lives. If you want to make it funny, do so, but you have to go all the way. Make the action playful, make the characters funny, make the atmosphere whimsical. The characterization and the general tone of the version we have, clashes with the visual and musical language of the action scenes, creating huge tonal dissonance.
4. Pointless action – this series was planned as a duology, not a trilogy. Splitting the story into three parts created huge issues for the structure. If you want to keep the Hollywood three-act format for each movie, you have to come up with a climax for the second one, that wasn’t originally there. And thus we get two action scenes – dwarves vs Smaug at Erebor and Legolas vs Bolg at Laketown – which are only there to give the audience a spectacle at the end of the film. These set pieces are completely useless from a narrative perspective, thus they have no stakes, thus they’re boring to watch. And they’re not an exception. The third movie is full of pointless action. If you want me to like an action scene, give me a narrative or a character reason to do so.

This is the last of my general thoughts, so we can now finally get to the reviews.

An Unexpected Journey

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. I believe the latter two corrupted my thoughts on the trilogy as a whole, to the point where I couldn’t find almost any positives, but this was quite a solid film. Enjoyable with some very frustrating issues. It is much lighter in tone and I believe that’s the direction the whole trilogy should have gone. Martin Freeman and Sir Ian McKellen are both stellar. The action isn’t great and the dwarves severely lack characterization, but the story works. Azog is a truly menacing villain, who ties the plot together nicely. The movie has a few structural problems (set-ups that are never paid off, the inclusion of the Sauron subplot, deus ex machina moments, etc.), but there’s way less of them than in the later films. I had a good time almost the whole way through and I wouldn’t mind watching it again sometimes, maybe with friends in a Tolkien marathon. The potential was certainly there and the issues could have been fixed.

The Desolation of Smaug

I found Desolation to be profoundly boring. The issues of the first movie aren’t fixed and the good stuff from it is being destroyed. Azog is replaced with the far inferior Bolg, the dwarves lose any personality they might have had, and most of what is introduced is either pointless or mishandled. Pointless scenes are added to fill time and thus the movie feels like it drags on forever. Desolation is also the biggest casualty of the three-movie decision. Being stuck in the middle of the series, it feels unimportant and unresolved. An Unexpected Journey was the exciting introduction with all the character growth, The Battle of the Five Armies is the climax and this one is just kind of there to fill time. The writers also had to come up with a set piece for the end of the film, which gave us the worst action scene in the entire trilogy. Fifteen minutes of stupid dwarves running around a dragon makes Smaug seem like a non-threat and cutting to Legolas fighting Bolg in Laketown for the most-useless-character trophy doesn’t help. It also introduces Alfrid, also known as the worst character I’ve seen on screen.

This movie completely squashed any potential this trilogy had and I have no desire to ever watch it again, but at least it prepared me for what was about to come.

The Battle of the Five Armies

Structurally nonsensical, emotionally weak, a pain to watch. Stuff in this movie happens for no reason. Plot points are brought up and swiftly forgotten (for example the Arkenstone, which is set up to be this extremely important thing, is just lost somewhere in Bard’s pockets and never spoken about again). Characters change unnaturally when the plot needs them to (Thorin being cured from dragon sickness). The whole thing is plagued with little mistakes and plot contrivances (for example mountain goats appearing out of thin air when the characters need to get somewhere). The battle is won by beating one bad guy as if the orcs were an alien hive mind. The movie completely forgets an army at one point and never mentions it again. The CGI is bad and unfinished. Alfrid appears 13 separate times in this movie (which should really tell you all you need to know)! I will say, the highlights are stronger than in Desolation (Thorin fighting Azog, Biblo saying goodbye to Gandalf), but the downfalls are so much greater as well. The experience is confusing and unpleasant. I don’t want to watch this ever again.