There's also an added poignancy to the trilogy, knowing that this terrible battle doesn't stop what happens down the line, in LOTR. Just like in real life, you can fight a terrible scrambling selfish war of necessity, of survival, and still have it recur for the next generation.
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Particularly given the fact that Tolkien served in WWI and lived to see WWII, this feels... powerful, somehow. Appropriate. Not at all like a distortion of the Hobbit, but an acknowledgement of the themes that ultimately governed his take on all Middle Earth.
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It's fun to clown on The Silmarillion as lots of wars over jewellery, but what sticks about Five Armies is that, even though it's the same premise, nobody truly gets what they want in the end, because the jewels are proven of hollow value next to the value of life.
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Thorin wants the Arkenstone; he only gets to hold it again in death, because of his hubris. Thranduil only gets involved to get his elvish jewels back, but seeks them so ruthlessly that he loses something greater: his son. Gold is hubris for characters minor and major.
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I'm always going to love the original LOTR films (and I may yet binge their extended editions too, because see above, re: raccoon person) but I think I might actually prefer the Hobbit trilogy - or its ending, at least - to the ending of Return of the King. It feels more human.
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The ending of LOTR is exhausting because it's exhaustive, trying to wrap up every lose end and show us how the world was fixed and made perfect forever - meaning, how it became narratively static. But at the ending of Five Armies, the world is still the world.
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Also, on a practical note, I liked that the Hobbit films, unlike LOTR, had visible background POC (the bar is SO LOW), had the women of Dale fight in the final battle, and, yes, introduced an extra female character because Tolkien was good at languages, not ladies.
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ANYWAY. I bought & binged the films because social distancing, figuring I could at least say I'd seen them and be done with it. I didn't expect to enjoy them as much as I did, and I'll be interested if there's anyone else who comes back to them with a different view.
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Seeing how low-ranked Five Armies is compared to the prior two, I can't help feeling that people were angry it was a tragedy instead of triumphant: that Thorin became flawed and cruel; that the hot dwarves died; that the world wasn't fixed by a pointless battle.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
Everyone who died died in the book though. It's not like fans weren't expecting it. All of the Story Beats (except the love triangle) were fine and good as you said. But (at least in the theatricle versions) they felt eclipsed by pointless spectacle, like the barrel scene.
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The barrel scene was literally a major part of the book.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
From the barrels being thrown into the river to them arriving in Laketown is barely two pages long and is just Bilbo clinging to a barrel and being miserable and hoping the dwarves were ok. It wasn't a ridiculous pitched battle. A quiet minute long scene would have been better.
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