The Hobbit is Not Very Good: An Unexpected Analysis - Part 3: The Battle of the Five Armies

Funny how the best scenes in each film focus on BILBO. It's... It's almost like the trilogy should have been about THE HOBBIT

A Random Film Talk is never late. He arrives precisely when he means to

The entire Shire didn't "forget" who Bilbo was. They were in the middle of auctioning off all his stuff, though. Bilbo would have months and months of trouble getting his property back (and never would get back his silver spoons from Lobelia). Also, hobbits are very suspicious of the out of the ordinary and the foreign, and a bit petty, so that they would claim this Bilbo is an imposter to keep the bargain buys they got from his estate sale is not hard to imagine. For the film to condense that into one small bit of dialogue asking Bilbo to prove his identity is fine with me.

A note: the 3 elven rings are completely invisible to the naked eye (for the average person/orc). The only time they can ever be seen is by Frodo when he sees Nenya on Galadriel’s finger (this is only because he possesses the One, Sam only sees a star through her fingers) and after the One is destroyed and the power of the rings has faded. At all other times they are obscured, and this is part of their nature. They were crafted by Celebrimbor for the pursuit of knowledge and for preservation, not for domination like the others. They are more secretive and nobody truly knew the bearers save a select few individuals. So, random mystery orc shouldn’t have been able to know Gandalf had the ring or see it. Not that the movies ever explicitly set up this precedent or rule (though the LotR trilogy strictly abided by it in practice), it’s just another example of the Hobbit throwing Tolkien to the wayside in favor or cheap gimmicks and insufferably clunky nostalgia bait.

Dain ends up being a great king. He helps the people of Dale become incredibly rich and he rebuilds relations between the Elves of Mirkwood and Dwarves, basically both occur because of all the trading that happens. We don’t see him in the LOTR movies because they’re fighting their own war near Erebor. Sauron tries to corrupt Dain by offering him the three Dwarven Rings he had if Dain tells him who “Baggins” is. He refuses, that is why Gimli and Gloin are at the meeting that creates the Fellowship. Dain sends them to warn Elrond that Sauron is mobilizing and has interest in Bilbo. Dain ultimately dies protecting the people of Dale who were retreating into Erebor. His son, Thorin III, then is able to defeat the armies attacking Erebor after his father dies and he goes on to rule Erebor after the War of the Ring.

Took waaaaay too long for me to remember that Gaston is not actually named Gaston. Excellent work once again!

Re: the constant breaking of time and distance - I read Christopher Tolkien's books on how his father created these stories. Prof Tolkien was always concerned with time and distance - whether the characters were moving by foot or by horse. He even was concerned about what the phase of the moon would be.

The fact that this movie shows a fantastic, emotionally moving, crucial and borderline tearjerking scene where Thorin dies making amends with Bilbo (the two most important characters) who breaks up mourning him and then cuts immediately to the pointless and vapid Elf Dwarf romance subplot with Tauriel mourning someone she met 3 days ago and has barely any chemistry with is both laughable and infuriating.

My favorite part of Battle of Five Armies is when Tauriel tearfully asks "Why does it hurt so much?" to which the shot reverses and Thranduil is suddenly replaced with Peter Jackson in a blonde wig saying "New Zealand trade unions and profits from 3 films instead of 2"

Although Bard didn't really get a backstory in The Hobbit, because Tolkien, telling the story to his children, needed a hero to kill the dragon, the little he gets is very cool. He leads the archers of Laketown, firing arrow after arrow until he is the only one left, and he is down to his last arrow, an arrow handed down from father to son, an arrow that may have been formed in Erebor itself. "Arrow!" said the bowman. "Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!" Now that's cool. Firing a ballista bolt from a broken bow is nowhere near as cool.

I love everything about the multiple choice segments. The ridiculous scenarios. The childish drawings. The fact that every childish drawing looks like it's from a different child. They're just so perfect.

Man, the book version where the Black Arrow was just a regular arrow fired by a regular man in last-ditch, Hail-Mary effort to save his town was so much cooler.

In the books, the battle spans about 2 pages, the eagles arrive much sooner, and Bilbo is the first see them before a random stone knocks him out **for the rest of the battle**. He wakes up afterwards and only learns then that Thorin was struck down by Bolg, Fili and Kili were killed defending him. Bolg is actually killed by Beorn, who shows up suddenly and bears (no pun intended) Thorin away from the battle. Azog was never there, because he was too busy being dead for much of the previous century.

“Out of my way, abandon the cripples” is my battle cry.

One note about the "dragon sickess": it is just one of the colloquial names of this thing that Tolkien insterted into the lore in the Silmarillion, actually. Gold, as in, the metal itself, does in fact carry spiritual evil. It contains it, it carries it, it conducts it like other metals or water does electricity. Evil or at least evil-prone creatures and men are drawn to it and they - meaning gold and someone enraptured by gold - eventually further corrupt one another. That's why it was the best choice for Sauron to pour his "wish" into that, and that's why the elves use gemstones - basically minerals - which are the stuff of stardust, to harness their power and light, use the "fairest and wisest" magic. That's why in ROP it doesn't make any sense that Galadriel is blacksmithing herself something from a fucking silver-gold alloy dagger :'DDD (Tolkien himself was also torn that he could not retcon everything he wrote in The Hobbit, so the Arkenstone is actually a mystery jewel left for the dwarves.) Tolkien wanted to reach back to the roots of everything , and he had incredible ideas about evil - necessary evil, AND unnecessary, inexplicable evil existing in the world, and he worked a great deal to explain and place them or at least tie them to something. That's why it hurts to see that if someone wants to make money off of something, it doesn't matter how much is already written. It doesn't matter if it's handed to them on a silver fucking plate. There are thousands of pages from his manuscripts, Unfinished Tales, etc, you don't need to make up any new bullshit. It was literally there they just needed to pick the best stuff, but nooo. It's fucking heartbreaking. I know, I know, rights an all that - but then don't make a fucking movie/series about something that you CAN'T make a movie/series about!!! Fucking hell. The only thing I will remember from the Hobbit movies, unfortunately forever, is Ian McKellen crying in that goddamn green room. Thank you so much for this absolutely thorough analysis!

Obviously Legolas left Lake-Town because he’s a god-level marksman who could pin a fly to a tree 100 yards away without killing it, meaning he would absolutely steal Bard’s kill unless the writers get him out of the scene. Having him chase Bolg out of town was a clunky solution to this writing issue. A better one would’ve been to just not have Legolas in Lake-Town in the first place!

I love the fact that every single time you gave us multiple choices all of the scenarios could have most definitely happened considering everything going on in this movie.

“Was it just hordes of orcs chilling and minding their own business until Sauron got back from his holiday in Dol Guldur” horde of orcs yelling and beating the s** out of each other* That cracked me up. 🤣

Another issue with the "go find Aragorn" scene is that Thranduil says he goes by the name "Strider". In Fellowship, both the book and film, Aragorn introduces himself to Frodo by saying that he goes by many names, but is known in THESE PARTS (Bree area) as Strider. Thranduil would unlikely ever have heard that name, and would likely call him by whatever name he uses when he passes through Mirkwood (or wherever Thranduil met him I suppose). But of course it's not fanservice unless he uses the exact name the audience is familiar with. Why didn't he just call him Aragorn? Thranduil obviously knows his name but doesn't tell Legolas for movie purposes.

"Instead of spending 4 hours watching this breakdown of the movie, you could just spend 3 hours watching the actual movie." me, starring at the camera isildurly: "No."