Ed's Review Dot Com

New Line Cinema, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), WingNut Films,

Benedict Cumberbatch, Cate Blanchett, Evangeline Lilly, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, Orlando Bloom, Luke Evans

The final chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit, the prequel to the Lord of the Rings series comes to a fine conclusion. As we left off, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) has awakened Smaug, the mighty dragon that is guarding the castle filled with gold belonging to the rightful Dwarf King Thorin (Richard Armitage), and is on the way to burn the already suffering town of Lake-town. But even after Smaug is dealt with, it won’t be easy to take back this fortress as it is highly desired by everyone, from the Dwarves, to the Elf’s to the Orc’s to the Goblins. All amass outside the gates of the city to fight the mightiest war of all times in the Battle of the Five Armies.

This trilogy has been absolutely awesome. Years ago I read all 4 books of Tolkien’s series, the first 3 large books which made up “The Lord of the Rings” with Frodo, grandson of Bilbo Baggins, as the hero. But after writing the books, Tolkien realized there was a lot of things left out of the history and to explain why things the way they were, so he wrote The Hobbit, where Bilbo takes Frodo aside to tell him the whole truth of what happened decades before when he was young. The Hobbit is a smaller book and much easier to read, and I have always enjoyed it much better than the other three that I found so complicated and hard to follow that it was really difficult to understand. The movies helped a lot, but it was a breeze going through The Hobbit, and I enjoyed it by far the most of all. But each of the 3 Lord of the Rings Trilogy of films was a much bigger book, and and entire book in one film. In the Hobbit a much smaller book was turned and stretched into 3 movies. The most heard complaint was that there was too much filler, the battle scenes were far too drawn out, and it was a mistake to try to stretch this out to 9 hours of film. But I found that I enjoyed the Hobbit films as much, if not even more so that the first Trilogy, and I was glad to have so much to watch.

But with the long delays between each of the films in this trilogy, I found it hard to follow. Director Peter Jackson and the Studios found a solution to that problem as well. Plus the were able to make a small fortune by releasing a MARATHON of ALL THREE FILMS two days early. Not only that, but in IMAX 3D. So we did it. I found out about this months ago, and scheduled Monday December 15th, 2014 as a vacation day. I bought the tickets a month early. My wife and I, and three of my four sons arrived about 12:30PM to the HUGE original full size IMAX screen at the Edwards Theaters in the Irvine Spectrum. This is a HUGE theater, and it’s a few years old, so not the most comfortable theater in the world, but it is the hugest screen we could find, and real IMAX picture and sound. The first film “An Unexpected Journey” kicked off at 1PM, and was done a little around a little after 4:00PM. Then the second film, “The Desolation of Smaug” started about 4:30, and finally we got to see the final film’s premier at 7:45. We finally finished up a little after 10:30, and we had a full day of Hobbit.

A few people showed up in costume, bringing Hobbit style snacks of veggies, milk, cheese, and fruit (How they got that past the usher I don’t know), but the majority were just big fans of the film. Lots of nerds like us were into it. There was a trivia table set up, and really good food from the snack bar. We got to see a couple special features, though very short. Between the first movie and the second, we got to see a short showing the London premier of “Battle of the Five Armies” featuring a great many of the characters in the film giving their thoughts and memories about filming these movies. But between the 2nd and the 3rd Movie Peter Jackson appeared on screen and talked about his feelings (He says he likes the third film the best) about the movies and congratulated us for being the first people on the planet to get to watch all 3 Hobbit films back to back to back. Then he said next time we will have to do all six.

I thought this experience was unique enough to speak a bit about, as I have never spent 9 hours in a movie theater before, although at one time years ago I did see a marathon of all three Star Wars films back to back to back. But the imagery in IMAX 3D was incredible. This is one AMAZING series with unbelievable special effects and CGI. The story is spell binding, and we are so familiar with the characters of the first two movies, that this was an incredible way to refresh everything and end the story while it’s all in mind. Basically, this is nearly a perfect film, perfectly cast, and perfectly filmed. There were several 3D moments that really made me jump with their realism. If you have seen the first two films in this series, RUN, don’t walk to the theater and see it. If you have not seen the first two, they’re on DVD, so watch them, and then get to the theater for Part 3 before it’s too late. This was the ultimate ending to the story, and left me thirsting to go back and watch the Lord of the Rings Trilogy once again before too much time passes. I LOVED it. This was a very memorable day!

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog