The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Is Final Proof That Peter Jackson Has Lost His Soul

 
I realize we’re a long way from Tolkien’s original novel here. (Remember that spry, quick-witted, briskly told fantasy that started this entire enterprise in the first place?) But it’s still worth noting that the so-called “Battle of the Five Armies” is confined in that book to a few cursory paragraphs near the end — an ironic, pointed bit of downplaying on the author’s part. The most interesting aspect of the battle is the fact that Bilbo Baggins — the protagonist of the book and, to some extent, the films — spends most of it on the sidelines and/or invisible, hiding from the “terrible” fighting. In other words, in just a page or two, Tolkien conveys the awfulness, and the sheer pointlessness, of war. But for Peter Jackson, war is not pointless; it’s an excuse. So now we have an entire movie built around said battle, loaded up with inane spectacle, with face-offs and collapsing bridges (do bridges ever stay intact in these goddamn films?) and vast vistas of armies thundering toward one another.

To what end? Most of what could be called a plot in The Battle of the Five Armies is spent tying up threads you might not even remember from the earlier films. "
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Review: The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies -- Vulture