13 Problems That Almost Ruin The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies
12. The Fight Choreography
You have to wonder about the logic of spending a massive amount of money and time on setting up massive set-pieces and effects and then shooting it in close-up that undermines the whole point of having a cinematographer. The camerawork is too fancy and artful for sequences that deserve to be shown simply and without unnecessary framing flourishes. Also, if you compare the fight sequences to those in the Lord Of The Rings (an inevitability, and an unfortunate one, frankly), they just dont have the same kind of threat. Even when faced with gigantic beasts (like the oddly familiar earth eaters that look like theyve been ported in from Tremors) the choreography never really makes it feel like the odds are in any way stacked. Perhaps that's because everyone knows most of the outcomes, but the lack of a surprise for most of those toe-to-toes combined with the way they're framed robs something. The problem is that so much of the combat is shown in super slow motion that its impossible to really believe the threat: when everything is injected with false importance or emotion, none of it rings true. Jackson clearly wanted his one-to-one battles and scores to be settled, so the fighting is a lot more personal at times, but there isn't enough of the grand staging and voyeuristic camera work that made the same sort of scenes in The Lord Of The Rings so good.
