The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies Review

I’m the resident book nerd here at Black Nerd Problems, so when we were volunteering to review The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, my hand went up so fast, you’d have thought I was an elf. (A Tolkien elf, not Santa’s elf. Stay with me now.) I took two of my favorite people with me, so we could geek about the movie in the car on the way home. It was a yelling, laughing ride in the Prius, for sure. This was a fun movie and if you’ve already put your green down on the first two, there’s no reason not to go see this one in the theaters.

Note: I love the book, The Hobbit. I loved it when it was profoundly uncool to love it, loved it when Martin Freeman (Bilbo Baggins) was 12 years old and Ian McKellen (Gandalf) was still acting for the BBC/PBS crowd. The book and this movie are two completely different creatures. I’m not going to waste any words on how the two are different, that’s obvious and irrelevant. So if your primary complaint is “It isn’t like the book!” then you can also hit me with the fact that you don’t like water because it is too wet and we can all move on. End note.

The movie opens with Smaug barreling down on Laketown with a fiery vengeance. It is an almost visually perfect opening sequence, all golden red fire and brooding grey blue water. There is even a little more taunting from everyone’s favorite dragon voice, Benedict Cumberbatch, which should keep the fan girls happy. The human hero, Bard the Bowman (played by Luke Evans), does that thing that was w…