The Hobbit and his clique are closer than ever to their dream, but the Orc armies were lurking, whether Thor Oakenshield would successfully regained his kingdom or not.
The parallel universe of men, half-men, dwarves, monsters, wizards, evil spirits, and benign forces has been deeply satisfying, but it needn't consume a lifetime.
With impressive battle scenes, unbeatable effects, good performances and a sustained emotional tension, Jackson managed to give a dignified closure to his interpretive meddling in Middle-earth. [Full review in Spanish]
For nearly 2.5 interminable hours, The Battle of the Five Armies throws waves of computer-generated elves and computer-generated dwarves against computer-generated orcs.
Mindless CGI spectacle overpowers every aspect of Peter Jackson's concluding Tolkien adaptation; like the other installments of this lumbering trilogy, it's more tech-demo than movie.
Without a single narrative throughline sufficiently weighty to justify the continued involvement of most of the main characters, just about everyone besides Thorin kind of... bops around.
It plays out as if someone chucked a whole bunch of carefully detailed Warhammer figurines into a centrifuge -- goblins, goats, dwarfs, wizards and wolves bouncing off one another in waves of alternating tedium and punishment.
The Battle of the Five Armies is a lot more of the same, substituting mindless, even dull action at the expense of character development [...] there is just enough here to be passable, and it completes The Hobbit trilogy on a mostly positive note.
Untold manpower, pixels, and money culminate in the gangbusters final installment. It can't redeem the useless tedium of the first two, which exist for gargantuan profits and structural necessity.
