Lee Pace

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies: A Movie Review

/ Casey Tingle / Leave a comment

In the last installment of The Hobbit trilogy, Bilbo, Thorin, and the rest of the dwarves enter the Lonely Mountain and begin looking for the Arkenstone. When it can not be located, Thorin begins to believe he is being betrayed by the other dwarves and begins to mistrust them. The people of Laketown and Thranduil the Elvenking are also demanding to receive treasures that belong to them in the Lonely Mountain, but Thorin  would rather go to war than hand his treasures over. At the same time, a dark force is growing and heading their way to take the Lonely Mountain by force.

As a fan of The Hobbit, I wasn’t too crazy about the last installment. I was excited about it coming out and I heard that it was a really great movie… and then I saw it. And it was OK. I thought there were a bunch of parts that were kind of corny and silly. The fact that Smaug dies within the first five minutes in the movie made me wonder why they waited until this movie to have that occur. Maybe they were afraid people would forget what had happened? I’m not really sure.

The rest of the movie was mainly the battle (which makes sense given the title). But that’s two hours of fighting, which some people may find to be boring. Of course, there are other small scenes that occur in the middle of the battle that set up the story for The Lord of the Rings and I did enjoy the bit at the end where Thranduil tells Legolas to go find Strider.

However, I still feel like this Hobbit trilogy could have been easily kept down to two parts. The majority of the second film didn’t even happen in the book and I think if there wasn’t all that extra story line added it could have all been cut down. But, overall I still enjoyed it and am glad that it was made into a film. But now I feel like I should go re-read the book!

Guardians of the Galaxy: A Movie Review

/ Casey Tingle / 1 Comment

After experiencing his mother’s death, Peter Quill is abducted by space pirates and grows up traveling through space committing petty crime. One day he steals an orb for a client, but begins to find out there is more to this orb than he was led to believe. Set with a rag tag team of thieves, Peter plans on getting rid of the orb before it can fall into the wrong hands.

While I’m not huge on comics, the main reason for seeing this film was the cast. I love Chris Pratt and Karen Gillan, and they both did an awesome job in this movie, along with Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, and Bradley Cooper. I also enjoyed the script, because, to me, the trailers made the movie seem like a comedic piece (which it was), but the writers didn’t lose certain serious elements of the story which helped shaped how certain characters turned out.

My one complaint about the movie, though, was I felt the relationship between Peter and Gamora moved too fast. So fast that it was a little unbelievable. I get that it’s a movie and that you only have a certain amount of time to build on these relationships, but I think there could have been some other elements to make their attraction more realistic.