10 Supposedly Badass Film Moments (That Were Totally Underwhelming)

In a classic example of what happens if you deviate too much away from the source material, this scene should have played out entirely differently were it not for the burgeoning need for the Hobbit series to invent more set-pieces to fill out its unnecessarily long life span.

The dwarves were supposed to have been sealed shut inside the barrels to make their escape from Thranduil's halls as that was the only way they could have managed to do so undetected, a fact the film chooses to completely ignore, and then make it totally implausible that they survive at all.

There is so much going on in this scene it is only when the action has stopped cutting between Orc-Elf-Dwarf fighting to see them literally barrelling through waterfalls, that you remember the dwarves should have been thrown out of their barrels and drowned or shot with arrows as soon as they hit the rapids. Quite how all of them manage to survive is beyond belief.

Then there is the clunkily inserted first-person-perspective footage taken of the barrels and their occupants hurtling down through the river rapids. It looks like someone with a Go-Pro having fun at their nearest water-park, and it takes the viewer out of the scene completely it's that bad to watch.

It's a scene that could have been a highpoint for the film if the approach had been toned down and someone had thought to tell Peter Jackson not to use the goddam Go Pros.