Ha!
Okay, I saw the movie last night. (Hey, I wait for movies to get to the cheap theaters.)
I agree with what others have said (in some cases, stuff that was predicted before the the first Hobbit movie was released). Filler, filler, filler. There were times I was sitting in the theater thinking, “They should have cut this scene and this scene should have been trimmed down to a five second shot and this scene should have been left for the DVD.”
And the weird thing was there were scenes that should have been in the movie and weren’t. Others have already mentioned Thorin’s funeral and him being buried with the arkenstone - that would have been a great scene and would have helped the narrative.
But the battle against Sauron? Shouldn’t have been there. It was a set-up scene for the Lord of the Rings and had nothing to do with the story in this movie. It also felt like the characters in that scene were appearing as cameos because they had to be included. Like Stan Lee.
The opening fight with Smaug didn’t work. The ending of the last movie set it up as a major event and then this movie blew it off too quickly. Too much antici for the amount of pation we got. The attack on Laketown and Smaug’s death should have been the climax of the second movie rather than the opening scene of the third movie.
There was a general sense that the timing of events was off in this movie. How long did the events in this movie supposedly take? How long was it from the day Smaug attacked Laketown to the day of the big battle? A day or two? A couple of weeks? A few months?
Overall, I’d guess it must have been months. We had a handful of people conducting a long search through an entire city and Thorin slowly descending into madness. We also had the word about Smaug’s death spreading throughout Middle Earth and armies being gathered and marched across continents. This makes it easy to believe that months had passed.
But at the same time, we had the Laketown people arrive at the mountain the night before the battle. So how long were they marching? All summer to walk between two locations that are within sight of each other?
It was pretty convenient that all of these different armies traveling all of these distances all just happened to arrive at the same location within hours of each other. What would have happened to Thorin if the dwarf army had arrived the day after the elf army did? Or if one of the orc armies had arrived a day earlier?