The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies - 10 Reasons It's A Great Adaptation

The biggest complaint about The Hobbit Trilogy has been the stretching of one book into three. Making two films was deemed acceptable; after all, everyone expected Peter Jackson to tie the story into the Lord Of The Rings films and use the appendices of those novels to flesh it out. But when the announcement came that The Hobbit was being made into three films it was viewed simply as a cynical, money-making move by the studio rather than a justifiable narrative decision. The first two Hobbit films failed to garner the same adoration that The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy; the first was too light, the second too dark and neither had the depth and grandeur of Jackson's earlier Middle-Earth films. But The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies was a different and much improved beast to its predecessors. You might ask how a two and a half hour film (it is the shortest of the Hobbit films) could be justified? After all the final film covers a mere 33 pages from the book. However The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies served to be a great adaptation of the story; it took those six small final chapters and delivered a movie that served as a satisfying conclusion to not just the trilogy, but the cinematic Middle-Earth as a whole. Jackson also borrowed from the wider Tolkein mythology, tying the film beautifully to the later (chronologically) trilogy without ever deviating from the structure of the book. So a month after you visited Middle-Earth for the last time, let's look at 10 examples of why The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies is a worthy adaptation of the story; not just of the end of the book, but the wider battle against Sauron and the forces of darkness.