Well I finally watched this today.
To explain, I love the LOTR trilogy. It's one of the best cinema going periods of my life, getting to watch those three films. But with the Hobbit films I quickly lost interest. I did go and see the first 2 in the cinema. But by the time 'battle of the 5 armies' came out I wasn't even going to bother. Which is just a great shame really.
The Hobbit trilogy suffered from so many things. There's been much debate on these here pages so I don't need to go into it much. One thing that stood out as I'm watching the film, I keep saying ( out loud a few times ) "I don't care about any of these characters" there was simply so little connection.
I sort of liked the Bowman guy, but did I feel any great connection with say: the people of Laketown. There's footage of them preparing themselves to go into the battle, me = yawn.
And why did the main party of Dwarfs have to look like comedy characters?? and now they're in battle we're supposed to take them serious. A few of them had a more serious human look, the ones that had a bit more of a fleshed out character story. But then the derpy looking ones, I actually figured out what they looked like after. They looked like minor characters out of the Asterix books, just some guy that Asterix chats to for a bit, appears in 7-8 frames, so needs a decent design and look, and then we're done with him.
But definitely not the look for a character that we're supposed to be invested in for 3 major feature films.
So watching the film was just a big 'lets get it out of the way' experience, watch a long drawn out battle. Some of the fighting was good, but the stuff from the LOTR trilogy felt more real. This had too much camera in close, orc steps in from left of frame 'swoosh' he's dead, orc steps in from right of frame 'swoosh' he's dead.
There was a few moments that did work quite well, I did like the ending, cutting back to old Bilbo at the moment when Gandolf arrives and knocks on the door.
Oh and oddly the moment when 'Kate from Lost' was in deep sorrow over the dwarf that she'd loved having died. The Elf king said a real good bit of dialogue about it hurts so much because it was real. That scene stood out as being really good despite me not having too much interest in the dwarf / elf love story.
Just too damn much CGI, "lets do like Lucas did for the battle droid verses Gungan battle."
Ah that's about it. Don't feel like writing more. . . but I did decide that right now I'm going to watch my Blu-Ray of Fury Road again to restore some balance.