{"id":34173,"date":"2014-12-22T15:42:09","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T20:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/?p=34173"},"modified":"2014-12-22T15:42:09","modified_gmt":"2014-12-22T20:42:09","slug":"the-hobbit-the-battle-of-the-five-armies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/2014\/12\/the-hobbit-the-battle-of-the-five-armies\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver<\/p>\n

\"\"\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For better or worse, \u201cThe Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies\u201d is little more than a long, drawn-out action sequence. I think it\u2019s for better. These Peter Jackson \u201cHobbit\u201d and \u201cLord of the Rings\u201d movies are notorious for taking forever to have anything interesting happen. This film does still have plenty of filler, but at only 144 minutes, it takes up less time than any other entry in the whole Middle Earth saga. And a lot of that 144 minutes consists of fighting and fire-breathing.<\/p>\n

The new film picks up where the last one left off, with deposed dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) getting revenge on his Dwarf conquerors by attacking the nearby village where their human \u201cfriends\u201d live. The few humans who helped the Dwarfs are more reluctant partners than friends, but Smaug doesn\u2019t know that and sets out to roast them all anyway. Much burning ensues. Smaug actually leaves the story pretty early, which makes me wonder why the sequence wasn\u2019t the end of the second film instead of the beginning of this one.<\/p>\n

This is followed by the real focus of the film, the conflict between the Dwarfs who have taken over Smaug\u2019s castle and the humans who just want a small share of the dragon\u2019s treasure and a place to live after he took out their village. Leading the Dwarfs is Thorin (Richard Armitage), who quickly becomes a greedy tyrant after assuming control. By his side is the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) who sees a need to save Thorin from himself. The humans are led by unlikely hero Bard (Luke Evans) and soon align with an Elf army led by Thranduil (Lee Pace) and his superstar son Legolas (Orlando Bloom). It looks like the three sides are about to go to war, but then they\u2019re all attacked by an army of Orcs who just want to kill everybody. Of course, it\u2019s also worth mentioning that all-powerful wizard Galdalf (Ian McKellen) tries to play peacemaker between the first three armies and introduces an army of his own after the Orcs show up.<\/p>\n

The climactic battle is indeed exciting, but I do have some issues with it. First of all, the Orcs are way too easy to kill. For a race of war-ready brutes, most of them offer about as much resistance as a line of dominoes. The heroes could beat them if they fought them with giant cotton swabs. I\u2019ve got one more, and I say it as an employee of Hershey\u2019s Chocolate World \u2013 they have all the durability of one of our Cookies n Cr\u00e8me bars.<\/p>\n

More troubling is that the special effects in the film are terrible. It\u2019s bad enough that all the Orcs look alike (there are two main leaders among them and for most of the film I thought they were the same character), but the use of green screens is really obvious. I half expected one of the actors to accidentally bump into one of them and make the whole background reverberate. It\u2019s a huge fall from grace considering \u201cThe Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King\u201d won eleven Oscars eleven years ago, and most of them were in technical categories.<\/p>\n

My many complaints aside, all the action does make \u201cThe Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies\u201d go by rather briskly. And I\u2019ll give the film credit for its humor, which works almost every time. As for the storylines, most of them are forgettable, though Thorin\u2019s descent into madness and tough love from his friends is surprisingly engaging. All in all, I\u2019m just glad that the overstuffed \u201cHobbit\u201d franchise is finally over and that the final installment was relatively painless.<\/p>\n

Two Stars out of Five.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies\u201d is rated PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images. Its running time is 144 minutes.<\/p>\n

Contact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bob Garver \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For better or worse, \u201cThe Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies\u201d is little more than a long, drawn-out action sequence. I think it\u2019s for better. These… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34173"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34173\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thelehighacresgazette.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}