The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

So, I went to see this film at the IMAX cinema at Bluewater last night. I have written about the previous films Part 1 and Part 2 if you click on the links. So, it would turn out that I haven’t written about the first film. That means I have no idea when or where I saw that film. Maybe (seeing it was released at the end of 2012) I didn’t get to see it at the cinema as that was a disaster year for me. I may have seen it at the cinema but not written about it in this particular forum. I just don’t know. I can recall listening to podcasts talk about High Frame Rate from the distant past. Sorry, let’s move on.

This, latest and last, part of the film series was OK. I think my rating of OK just reflects the fact that over the last 15 years we have seen plenty of orc armies fighting the elves and hobbits helping out. The Lord of the Rings films had the element of awesomeness as that sort of thing just hadn’t been seen on the big screen before. For this film to be brilliant I needed to see something new. Overall, this film ended the series perfectly well.

There was quite a bit of wistful staring straight into the camera. The film could have been a lot shorter without all that stuff.

As a hint to the peoples of Middle Earth, if you think you’ve killed a big monster, cut the head off or stab the thing through the heart again. It makes simple battle sense.

The Desolation Of Smaug

It’s a long time since I read The Hobbit. All I can remember is that it is about Bilbo Baggins and that there is a ring involved. So my impressions of the film are not contaminated by things like accuracy to the book.

This was the first ever film I have seen in IMAX 3D HFR and it looked absolutely brilliant. I am just so impressed with what the thing looks like. I loved the film. The 160 minutes passed really quickly and I was fascinated and enthralled for the whole thing.

There were a few places where I think the HFR acted against the “look” of the film. The first film looked oddly “other worldly” during the bright daytime scenes and I think that’s something we can get used to. There were a couple of shots during the Barrel Escape set piece that I thought looked like 1970s special effects on TV. The problem is I can’t explain what I mean by that.

I can’t wait for my children to be old enough to cope with the spiders, dragon, orcs and Sauron. This film was brilliant. I’m so looking forward to watching the three Star Wars films and also the six Middle Earth films.

Brilliant.