Oh my god. Just... wow. I went to see this last night with my girlfriend and her Dad, and good lord. I wouldn't do this for any other film, but it pissed me off so much, I'll have to get this off my chest. In semi-chronological order;
- People are dead on saying that it ended in the wrong place. The silly phenomenon of multiple part movies has always irked me, but no more than in Battle does it seem so clumsy. Hey, remember that dragon that got pissed a year ago? Do most audiences even remember why he's pissed? It was pretty obvious when Voldemort was on the prowl in Deathly Hallows Part II why he was on said prowl, because you'd had seven movies prior to build that up. Smaug has very much been an absentee thus far, an omen from the start. And... oh, he's dead. Look, this is how the book goes down, no getting around it. And to be honest this is why The Hobbit always felt so anti-climactic to me, even reading it as a child.
- We're less than ten minutes in and the stupid elephant surfing action has already begun. The action in LotR was always a little unbelievable, but it always had a sort of heaviness/natural clumsiness to it. But hey, here's Bard the Generic Reluctant Hero fashioning a bow out of a snapped piece of thread, and his son's shoulder. Wouldn't the end of that arrow wanged his head on the way into Smaug's chest? But this wasn't even on the Top 10 of "Stupid Battle Shit" that occurs in this film.
- Oh hey Alfrid! Don't really like him much. Hope he doesn't show up, say, equal to or more than Martin Freeman's character. You know, The Hobbit? Centrepiece of the story Remember?
- Dragon sickness should have been a nice subtle decay of Richard Armitage's Thorin, and I suppose if Jackson has such a hard-on for sewing these two seperate trilogies together, it can be a nice way to explain why Bilbo finds giving up the precious ring so easily. But guess what? Thorin was played as an absolute cunt from the first movie, and so I really couldn't give less of a shit.
- And yeah, the dragon sickness is not subtle. Like at all. Like, a dragon swimming under a pool of molten gold that swallows him... that's not how you do symbolism PJ.
- Is it just me, or did anyone else find themselves laughing when they really shouldn't have been? Whether it was Thorin saying "I AM KINGGGGGGGGGGGGG", or
jesus christ did nobody else notice the troll with the fucking brick on it's head just flinging itself at the wall what the hell
- Thranduil, Thorin, I just don't care. They're both awful, awful people. Bard is supposed to be the likable one clearly, but he's just so dull! I hope wereworms eat him. Hah, but that's ridiculous, because wereworms were just Hobbit myths and not
actual palpable creatures, right....?
-
JUST CALL BARD DAD. STOP CALLING HIM "DA". YOU'VE ALREADY MADE REFERENCE TO "THE HORDES OF HELL" WHEN HELL ISN'T A THING IN MIDDLE-EARTH. CHRIST.
- The Dol Guldur scene is one of the many moments in the film where I felt like I should have had shivers run up my spine. Like this should have totally been a "Theoden King stands alone..." moment. But it wasn't. First of all, Gandalf's AWOL for the entire 2 minute battle. For a start, Dol Guldur... I mean, it beats Elf/Dwarf love already solely due to the fact we have it in writing from Tolkien it actually took place. But it's narratively out of place in the film, and I mean a 9 hour long epic. It just doesn't feel "right". Like, they defeat Sauron... sort of? What was the point? So, the nine ringwraiths are defeated, except not really... and Sauron is revealed, and he's returned, and we must make a concerted effort to track him down... except not really. And oh, Peter Jackson foreshadowing like a man punching you very hard in the face, over and over. "Leave Sauron to me". I think I cringed so hard I burst a blood vessel.
- ... so Galadriel's moment of darkness when the Ring of Power was within her grasp is apparently a thing she can do at will now whenever she feels like it?
- How does Azog's arm bones not just snap whenever he uses his sword. That's probably the nittiest pick I've made so far, because he's basically Captain Hook, but it just looks so... fragile.
- I assume the necklace Thranduil wanted was Legolas's mothers, and they'll explain that in the EE, because they sure as fuck didn't expand on that out of nowhere tidbit.
- Hey, it's Kili and Tauriel. Well, this was probably my least biggest problem with the film in honesty. But of course, it was handled awfully. See: "Thranduil is a cunt: Part XV"
- Is that... is that Billy Connolly? Is that an almost entirely CGI Billy Connoly? Could they just not be fucked with the prosthetic dwarf makeup? Did his Scottish rage just make them go for a computer face? Absolutely bizarre, and arguably worse than anything in LotR.
- The battle begins! And... so do the shitty, needless, would-make-George-Lucas-blush throwbacks to LotR. From "Fall back!" to "The eagles are coming!" "The battle for ____ is about to begin", just bugger off. It isn't clever. It's cringeworthy. It's dumb. It's not linking the trilogies, it's just further reminding your audience those infinitely superior films were a thing.
- The battles are just so subdued and stretched out. Appropriate for this film I guess, but it is frustrating when an eagle flies over, the horrible orc you're fighting to the death does nothing, turns around to expose his neck, and
you just stand there.
- Thorin is a dumbfuck Part XVI: Let's stare into the maybe dead face of a known to be impervious to death orc that wants me dead as I stand on the precipice of a lake full of freezing cold water. Because I have to die. It's in the script.
- "You will die first! Then the brother! Then YOU Thorin!" I mean seriously, is he just reading through what is actually written down in The Hobbit, or what?
- We're once again reminded that Legolas is here. Not only is he here, but he has to be a dick like his Dad (less so as the film goes on), and inexplicably is Spider-Man too. I wonder if Jackson at any point just considered having him do bullet-time arrows, and shoot out like 3 at once. When he's walking over a falling bridge like he's in SMB3:
You kind of just think, why not at that point?
- Every scene with Martin Freeman is gold, of course. And thus all the more baffling why they take up less than 20% of the film
- I mean seriously, WHY DO THEY NOT JUST SEND ALFRID AWAY.
Why does Bard leave him with his children?
- I mean, nobody noticed the fucking troll with a battering ram hat? Nobody?
- CGI is bloody awful, Azog looks no less like a Harry Potter video game boss version of Voldemort than he did two years ago.
- Thorin and Azog die in what is basically a double-ended dildo session. I bet they're quite relieved. They've been chasing each other for three years, for reasons.
- Bilbo cries over the death of Thorin, for reasons. Maybe it's like an abusive boyfriend kind of thing; Thorin's been, again, a monumental cunt to Bilbo. Boromir basically tries to kill Frodo and still ends up having an appropriately emotional death scene. Nobody cares about the dwarf that is KIIIIIIIIIIIIING.
- Seriously just shoot an arrow into him Legolas. You didn't have any, but you did before. Why didn't you do it then.
- The endings come together. All people can now officially eat crow for saying Return of the King has too many endings, because at least we got some god damn resolution for most/nearly all characters we've spent 9 hours watching interact and grow together. What on earth happened to nearly every character that wasn't Bilbo? You spend three films ignoring Bilbo, then remember this, and attempt to compensate by saying "fuck it" to every other character apart from him?
- "There's a young ranger by the name of Strider..." Who is barely eating solid food. Fuck you Peter Jackson. Fuck you. It makes absolutely no sense why a xenophobic, isolationist elf like Thranduil would suddenly know of this boy, and give a shit. He clearly doesn't really liase with Elrond too much. They're basically setting up a Legolas x Aragorn movie, and I couldn't give a damn.
- Favourite part of the movie was when it ended (Ha... ha...). But seriously, it was lovely. Exactly the tone the film should have been, rather than a three hour cobbling together of poorly animated battle scenes and bland melodrama from boring, unlikable characters.
Done.
