Post by QueueMistressMags on Dec 2, 2014 2:54:43 GMT
I've been reading some reviews, and they are all snarky about the whole Hobbit/LOTR thing but all agree that The Battle of Five Armies is the best of the Hobbit trilogy. It feels like they're warming up for awards season; and like LOTR, they're waiting till the last film to reward Sir Pete.
The Variety review is a good example--warning, it's a bit spoilerific if you haven't read the book. I loved this, though--
ska-WEEEEEEEEEEEE! Oh, I can't wait. I take such deep personal delight in Thorin!angst.
And for those concerned about the extended battle scene:
heeeeeeeeee!
This from a toffee-nosed Variety movie reviewer! My fellow Horatians, I, for one, am getting excited.
WHICH IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG. Sheesh. If they would only LISTEN to me, we would all do so much better.
The Variety review is a good example--warning, it's a bit spoilerific if you haven't read the book. I loved this, though--
And if “The Battle of the Five Armies” feels psychologically weightier than the previous “Hobbit” films, that’s largely a credit to Armitage, who plays Thorin with the paranoid despotic rage of a Shakespearean king, his heavy-lidded eyes ablaze with a private madness.
ska-WEEEEEEEEEEEE! Oh, I can't wait. I take such deep personal delight in Thorin!angst.
And for those concerned about the extended battle scene:
But then, the battle’s the thing this time, and when Jackson gets to the nearly hourlong setpiece (commencing around the 70-minute mark), he stages it grandly even by his own Wagnerian standards.
heeeeeeeeee!
This sort of scene, drawing on every available trick in the CGI paintbox, has become such a reliable staple of Jackson’s work (to say nothing of the many lesser films of the past decade that have worn his influence on their sleeves) as to risk seeming almost ordinary. But Jackson, who’s surely aware of this conundrum, invests his five-army rumble with such a visceral feeling for landscape and physical action, a sure eye for elaborate battlefield choreography and, above all, a sense of purpose, that he leaves most of the competition — including some of his own previous battle sequences — seeming like so much digital white noise.
This from a toffee-nosed Variety movie reviewer! My fellow Horatians, I, for one, am getting excited.
...it’s easier now to see the entire “Hobbit” project as a labor of love on Jackson’s part, rather than a descent into crass box-office opportunism. Where the first two films often felt like a marking of time by a director intent on fattening his own Smaug-like coffers, “The Battle of the Five Armies” contains a series of emotional payoffs and bridges to the “Lord of the Rings” films that work as well as they do for having been carefully seeded by Jackson in the previous episodes.
WHICH IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING ALL ALONG. Sheesh. If they would only LISTEN to me, we would all do so much better.