“Butter Battle” – not a reference to Dr Seuss’s little known, but excellent Cold War allegory, but my two word review of Peter Jackson’s third movie in The Hobbit saga, “The Battle of the Five Armies”.
Firstly, “Battle” – because that just about sums up the movie – not much else happens. The actual battle of five armies in Tolkien’s book takes up only 5 pages, but Peter Jackson somehow spins it out to encompass most of the 2hrs and 20mins of the movie. The scenes between the battle scenes, seem cursory, superfluous to the plot, with many of them additions not in the original story, added merely to give the viewer some respite before plunging into yet another predictable battle scene, with many of these also additions to the original story.
Secondly “Butter” – because to borrow words from a rather erudite author, adapting just 50 pages of original story into a 2.5hr movie “feels all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”
