It is in this opening sequence that the fear so many characters in the series hold regarding the dragon is justified. He’s intimidating, clever, vain and just an overall terror to behold. Though he isn’t given a ton of dialogue, as he’s too busy breathing fire, the moments in which Cumberbatch speaks as Smaug are just as incredible as they were in the previous film. Smaug is one of the most iconic dragons in fantasy literature, and his depiction in these films really lives up to that reputation. But it is in the opening of this film that the Hobbit trilogy finally delivers the crazy dragon-breathing action that it had been promising for so long. This power was teased in the opening flashback of An Unexpected Journey, and then The Desolation of Smaug showed a bit of it as the dragon chased the Dwarven company around Erebor. It’s the climactic moment that everything in The Desolation of Smaug was building toward, and it’s the first and only time in this entire trilogy of films that the audience sees Smaug really let loose his immense destructive power. To quote Bilbo Baggins from later in his life, The Battle of Five Armies feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.ĭespite what the following two hours bring, The Battle of Five Armies gets off to an excellent start with the dragon attack on Laketown. Each scene is squeezed for every ounce of material it can provide, and the result is a film that feels devoid of any passion. While there is interesting material and ideas on its surface, the further into its runtime you get, the more lifeless and hollow the movie feels. Jackson supplemented the trilogy with a lot of material taken from the Lord of the Rings appendices, but even with that, The Battle of Five Armies is an empty shell of a movie. The lack of material to sustain such a lengthy adventure was a major concern for many fans going into the Hobbit trilogy, as the original book is merely 300 pages in length. While the previous two Hobbit films are full of various adventures and different predicaments ranging from stone-trolls to riddles with Gollum and forest spiders to a fire-breathing dragon, The Battle of Five Armies spends most of its time just sitting around an empty mountain while characters debate over what they should be doing instead.
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