The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
I never watched the third part because my love for the whole thing was strangely waning. I read the books (and the Silmarillion and so much secondary literature, including a lot of Tolkien’s language nerding stuff), but two years later, when the last film came out, I was not dating the person anymore who I watched the first movie with and was really turned off by the idea of a one-hour long good-bye scene. (Actually the person I dated afterwards was also into Lord of the Rings and owned all three films in the extended edition, but my disinterest in spending 3 hours on them was stronger.) I still loved the book and didn’t want it ruined by the film (which “The Two Towers” did a little bit). I never forgave the franchise of making the Aragorn-Arwen lovestory so incredibly awkward, and the awkwardness certainly has not improved in “The Hobbit”.
Actually by the third instalment of “The Hobbit”, I was resigned to the fact that it would involve a really awkward love story, and obviously it did. I knew that Kili would die (whoever didn’t want to be spoiled about this one deserved it, because you should have read the books ;) ) and the part surrounding his death was then terribly predictable. Predictability was a general problem in this film because they needed to tie the ends and they needed to do it according to the book. So we were served a few lovely action scenes (albeit I preferred the ones from movies 1 and 2) and all these storylines you were always wondering about before were brought to a somewhat satisfying end. That’s what the last “Hobbit” movie was: satisfying. They were a lot of “ugh this is so stupid” moments but I left the movie theater with some feeling of closure, which is more than I could have expected from the first film.
But most of all, the movie makes me feel so old! It’s been so long since the first Lord of the Rings movie came out, and I have such fond feelings of that time. It’s mostly because of this nostalgia that I insisted on watching the last film in theaters (I was so busy during that time, we definitely would not have otherwise), and I am actually glad that Pip only saw the first two (which were definitely superior films). If they turned the Silmarillion into movies, I would definitely watch it.