Last Week’s MM: Hearthstone

I recently saw The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies.  It’s a strange thing to walk away from a Lord of The Rings movie feeling like it needed to be longer.  But, I found the movie to be lacking.  Not sure how to better say it.

***MAJOR SPOILERS***

This movie felt like it had no real story.  It was as if they were like:

“Well, we killed the dragon.  Now what should we do with the last 2 hours of the movie?  Oh, I know, everyone loves the big castle battles, right?  Is there anyway to shoe-horn one of those in here?  Yes?  Great!  But, maybe Gandalf should be doing, something.  Oh, and Elves have magic!  Gandalf, not so much, but that one elf, so much magic!  Okay, this is filling out.  But, we need some more tension.  I know we don’t have any real tension, but let’s put some in anyway.  How about if that one Dwarf that everyone loved becomes a jerk for no reason?  Now they all have a reason to fight!  Except the elves.  But they can fight the Orcs because… I mean, it’s a battle of 5 armies, so they all have to fight.  They aren’t actually trying to redeem themselves for the way they abandoned the dwarfs last time, they’ll just fight until the main elf thinks enough had died.  No mention of restoring honor or becoming allies or anything.  Let’s make sure that all of the main characters that need to fight are seperated and split off from the main battle.  Because why would they be in the main battle?  Yes, that means sending Kate-from-Lost-elf and Legolas to go scout out a place for no reason, just to get back too late for it to matter that they went there, but it makes them late so they can be split off.  Speaking of those elves, does this love-triangle thing make any sense?  No?  Kate is just using Legolas but doesn’t care at all and no one mentions a thing about it?  Well, we’ll leave it in anyway.  People love love-triangles!  Oh, man, there are so many Orcs.  How can we still have the good guys win?  I know, duh, Eagles!  Everyone loved the eagles, right?  No?  Well, they’re coming to save the day anyway, because that’s just how eagles roll.  Yeah.  Now we’ve got a movie!”

I’ll say that the movie was watchable, but it’s likely only because I already had so much time invested into the series, plus childhood nostalgia.  In all honesty, my favorite part of the whole thing was the different mounts that they had.  That was great.  I loved the reindeer (I guess that’s what that was) and the mountain goats.  Not sure where they goats came from, but they were useful.  And there was a pig.

So, maybe see this movie to see the series through.  But, I don’t know.  It’s difficult to know if this one will be better on the small screen or the big one.  But it’s hard to skip out on something that is the third (or sort of sixth) of its franchise.