[Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers about “The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies.”

As someone who knows a fair amount about limping, I can recognize a limp when I see one. Some of the reviews about this film [1] complained about the poor pacing of this film, which takes a small amount of material at the end of a novel written for children and turns it into a two and a half hour movie and the third film of a trilogy that just about everyone agrees is at least one film (if not two films) two long [2]. Is it a good movie? Yes. Does it have epic battle scenes, meaningful emotional drama, and majestic sights of the best green screens that can be found in New Zealand? Yes. Will anyone be screaming for a film version along these lines from The Children Of Hurin? Probably not, at least those comparatively few among the viewers of this film who would know who they are. This is a good film, a satisfying film, and a beautiful film, and that is what paying audiences will come to see as they say goodbye to the Peter Jackson era of The Lord Of The Rings.

This film has a lot of what I would expect to see if Middle Earth had been designed a lot like the earth I’m familiar with. It has friends proving to be loyal in immensely difficult and adverse situations, a touching but deeply sad love triangle where I actually thought that Legolas showed a great deal of emotional depth and maturity, which was highly unexpected. Doing the noble thing for a girl one loves even when she is in love with someone else is not an easy thing to do at all. We get to see a lot of characters dealing with the loss of home, whether that is Legolas leaving home after his father tries to kill the low-born elf that he loves (who loves a dwarf), with the people of Laketown ending up destitute refugees seeking a home, and with Bilbo Baggins finding his home looted as he returns from his lengthy journey. Anyone who has experience with the alienating experience of being an exile, being thrown out of a country, or finding oneself a stranger even at home will find much of resonance here.

There is one huge irony that runs through this film. Over and over again the movie points to Thorin Oakenshield as an example of what happens when someone becomes afflicted with dragon sickeness, the dangerous lust for gold. Thorin wrestles with its effects, and just about everyone in the movie, including Thorin’s own relatives and retainers, comments about his sickness. Yet just about everyone in the theaters watching this film knows what that sickness looks like, because they are watching its effects. This film may spout off bromides like, “If more people preferred the comforts of home to gold, then the world would be a merrier place,” but this film only exists because some people (and probably a lot of people) have gold hunger. Some people dress in drag because of their gold hunger, and others accuse their family members of being disloyal thieves and barricade themselves in a fortress while their relatives face death and they are themselves are outnumbered many times over by potential allies who simply want Thorin to pay them according to their agreement. Still other people, when suffering the ravages of dragon fever, turn a 300 page novel for children into three lengthy films filled with flashbacks, characters not in the book, foreshadowing of films the audience has already seen, and yet still cannot manage to make most of the main characters (the dwarven company) distinguishable from each other. All of this does not make for a bad film, but it certainly is too much of a good thing, even if it is still a good thing.

[1] See, for example:

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/12/17/movie-review-the-hobbit-the-battle-of-the-five-armies/

http://www.nerdist.com/2014/12/review-the-hobbit-the-battle-of-the-five-armies/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/a-desolate-transition/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/an-unexpected-journey/