The Hobbit 3: The Battle to Stay Awake

As a die hard Lord of the Rings fan, the last gasps of the franchise in the form of the bloated Hobbit trilogy has been particularly excruciating. While I loved the first Hobbit movie, I now see that I was wearing the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia and was merely grateful to return to Middle Earth. Last year, after the crushing disappointment of The Desolation of Smaug, I said in my review that I would still see the third Hobbit movie in theaters. Sadly I couldn't even manage that. Nearly four months after its theatrical release, I finally got around to watching The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies at home, and it was every bit as disappointing as I had expected.

This is a movie on its last legs. After all the build up to the dragon, Smaug, in the last movie, he is killed off in the first fifteen minutes (oh what's that? Spoiler alert? Believe me, you don't want to watch this movie anyway) and the rest of the movie crawls to its inevitably dull conclusion. It is about The Battle of the Five Armies, an event that takes up all of six pages in my copy of The Hobbit and is mostly described as an afterthought because Bilbo is knocked unconscious halfway through and therefore experiences almost nothing of the battle. The CGI armies are in full force, people live and die, and Bilbo gets to home to the Shire with a bunch of treasure. 

There was much anticipation about how this movie would serve as a LOTR prequel and help set up the events that lead into the beginning of of The Fellowship of the Ring. If it did that, I didn't notice, probably because I wasn't paying attention. All I know is that Legolas was still inexplicably swanning around as the star of the piece, doing ridiculous stunts that inspires jeers rather than cheers, and Galadriel showed up for a fight sequence where they did the weird things to her voice and face that could be passed off as a random moment in FOTR but were now just painfully protracted and pointless. 

The dialogue felt like it was straight out of Days of our Lives. For the first time, I understood how non-fans must have felt when watching these films. It was so steeped in portentous Tolkien lore that even I couldn't stop rolling my eyes. The special effects continued to feel forced and the actors, while gamely trying to act their way through this morass, simply had no material to work with. This is a cast stacked to the brim with my all-time favorite actors and yet they had nothing to do. Attempts at levity were quickly smothered, and dramatic flourishes were drowned in awful dialogue or noisy action. The whole elf-dwarf love story was cause for further annoyance and overall, I cannot recall a single detail that I enjoyed about this experience. 

I was over the moon when I first heard they were making The Hobbit. I was happy when they said it would be two movies, slightly concerned when that got expanded to three. And now I am weary of the trilogy and ready to forget it ever happened. Farewell Hobbit. It was (not so) nice knowing you.