A Movie Review. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. When it comes to sequels related to movie series like Harry Potter and Hunger Games, you feel like you need to see the next one.  As for this third Hobbit movie, you feel like you're being taken to the cleaners -- as in there is financial abuse going on here by the studio.

The movie basically feels like one long battle scene.  The movie starts with Bard (Luke Evans) taking on the dragon.  His city is laid waste by the dragon, but as with many who feel they are invincible, Dragon Smaug doesn't take his opponent as seriously as he should.  Just like David (as in David and Goliath), Bard finds Smaug's weak spot and takes advantage of it.  You're one dead dragon.

Bard leads his people up to the abandoned city of Erebor.  He needs shelter for his people and also wants Dwarve King Thorin (Richard Armitage) to honor his agreement to share the treasures that were under Smaug's control.  A problem arises, Thorin is not in a proper state of mind.  Elves also arrive at the scene, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace).  They demand their treasures back, as well.  At the same time, Orcs are marching towards Erebor.  A dwarve army arrives on the scene to support Thorin (perhaps not realizing that Thorin is being unreasonable).  The sides are about to clash when the orcs arrive for battle.

Now we have three major forces on the same field.  It doesn't take long for the elves and dwarves to realize they better put aside their disagreements.  A major battle breaks out.

In between the battle against Smaug and the orc army, there are some in between scenes of humans trying to find shelter, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) needing assistance from Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) and Elrond (Hugo Weaving), and Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) going off on an adventure that gets stopped when they run into an orc army that sends them back to Erebor.

As mentioned, this movie has the feel of financial abuse.  It just feels like the only purpose of the movie is to show one long battle scene along with a seriously drawn out farewell.  And then what's up with the battle scene?  The dwarves prepare for battle by going into a Greek style defense, but they don't stay in that position for long.  If this type of battle formation worked well for the Greeks in war, why didn't the dwarves battle it out in that formation instead of just using it for show?  And how is it that a well train elvish army loses like 90% of its soldiers while a highly untrained human army loses maybe 10%?  And it just looked like the orcs were all talk with no bite.  It looked like every elf or dwarve was able to kill 10 orcs with relative ease.  A rather useless allie for the evil eye, I'd say.