So, I saw the new Hobbit movie on Friday and now I finally got over the shock of how awful it was enough to write something about it.
!WARNING - minor spoilers ahead!
First of all, let me say that after the first two films I went into this one with super low expectations and yet it still managed to disappoint me bitterly - I just couldn't believe how boring it was.
As expected, three quarters of the film are comprised of megalomanic battle shots of immense armies of generic CGI figures and since the previous films didn't manage to build any kind of real affection or even sympathy in me for any of the sides fighting in the battle, I didn't care at all about who'd win and who'd lose.
The only character I was at least a little bit emotionally invested in was Bilbo, who however gets so little screen-time that the title of the film isn't even justified. There is no clear protagonist in this movie - you may think it's Thorin but he didn't manage to win my sympathies in the previous films and while he does have a last minute change of heart towards the end of this one, he spends most of it acting like a first class a-hole and actually in a way, the closest thing to a protagonist this movie has is the character of Bard, who at least has a righteous claim in this battle and tries to resolve things peacefully but is denied by Thorin, which sort of makes Thorin one of the many villains of this movie rather than the hero.
Perhaps the best that can be said about the movie is that it has quite a few moments that made me chuckle, some of them even intentionally. The moments which were supposed to be the most emotional and sad were conveyed with such pathos that they were actually rather humorous and the fights between the "heroes" and the main villains once again looked like a video-game and totally ignored the laws of physics and because I either didn't really care about the people in those fights or I knew they would survive, the stakes were almost as low as in the battles of the faceless CGI fighters.
The cherry on the top of the sh*t-pile was when I noticed that the dwarf Dain (Thorin's cousin) inexplicably seemed to be CGI and looked like the characters from the CGI animated Beowulf movie - that was the moment I seriously considered walking out of the theater.
All-in-all it was the weakest of the three Hobbit films and that is saying something. I have been watching the extensive extras from the extended edition of Desolation of Smaug over the last week and it makes me kind of sad to see how much work and love and care was poured into these films - especially into designing the world - only to end up with something which is beautifully designed and crafted but painfully mediocre in all its other aspects. In my book Peter Jackson can go ishkh khakfe andu null.