I went to see the Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies with my family yesterday. I don’t think that this is going to be a very long review from me because I already addressed some of the things that I wasn’t too thrilled with in my last review from the Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug.

If I was annoyed and angry by Tauriel’s role in the Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug, then I was made ten times more so by the Hobbit: the Battle of the Five Armies, especially towards the end of the movie where Tauriel somehow loses her ability to be a kick-butt warrior and instead because a pathetic woman who does none of her neat, elvish acrobatic tricks when battling the final big bad guy. She gets swatted aside like a pestering bug and then she jumps on the bad guy’s back, just like anyone with zero combat training would do. She didn’t use any of her elvish abilities to be faster or find those key weaknesses, all so that she could become the damsel in distress and have one of the male characters defeat a bad guy that wasn’t even in the book.

Overall, this movie felt more like a game of Zelda to me, with puzzle obstacles and the whole ice battle at the end. I was actually amused by the final individual battle between Thorin and the main orc leader because it was fascinating to me to see an actual situation where the ball and chain from the Legend of Zelda: the Twilight Princess might actually find a use. That whole final battle was highly amusing to me, though I’m sure it was supposed to be more dramatic than amusing.

I’m not sure the movie did as good of a job as the book with showing how Thorin spent most of the book only being motivated by greed, but the movie did at least try and show how much Thorin changed after or during the war. And it didn’t show Thorin changing and admitting his changes to anyone other than Bilbo, and that made me sad because it was much more powerfully done in the book than in the movie because everyone saw Thorin, and everyone had seen how poorly Thorin treated Bilbo when Bilbo was trying to prevent the war. So when Thorin admitted in front of everyone on his death bed that Bilbo was right, it had more impact.

Overall, the movie was good for what it was, but I’m still only going to rate it as a midgrade two on my rating scale. There was stuff they just randomly added to the movie in order to tie it to the Lord of the Rings and that was fairly annoying. Maybe I would have appreciated these movies more if I hadn’t read the book? I don’t know.