I suppose I owe my 4 readers an update on the third of the Hobbit movies.

We figured it couldn’t get worse, but we were wrong.

To quote directly from the original Hobbit: It was called the Battle of Five Armies, and it was very terrible. And boy howdy was it terrible.

At some point in the second movie we decided to try to view the movies as Hobbit-adjacent fan fiction, but in movie three they stopped even pretending that they had read the book, and just started making stuff up.

We use the term “chase scene” to refer to a scene that was gratitously added to a story to make it more exciting on screen. This comes from the bizarre chase scene that was added in the Jim Carrey animated Christmas Carol movie, which was invented from the air, and included a miniaturized Srooge (but why?) being chased by rats.

BoFA was all chase scene. Just so much chase scene. And the few parts that they got almost right, they still managed to get wrong. The wonderful scene when Thorin apologizes to Bilbo and begs him to part as friends, was beautifully acted, but happened at the wrong place and time, for no discernible reason.

Once again we kept asking ourselves, why would they change *that*?? Changes that made no sense, and added nothing to the story, the drama, or anything else. I just don’t understand.

Anyways, we’re glad it’s over, and we watched the  1977 animated made-for-TV Hobbit as a palate cleanser. It was *way* better.