The third and final installment of Peter Jackson’s  The Hobbit trilogy came out in theaters on Wednesday, December 17th.

The Battle of the Five Armies picks up right where The Desolation of Smaug left off. Smaug the dragon flies off to get revenge on the dwarves by burning Laketown. Bard the Bowman kills the dragon by shooting the Black Arrow (the only thing that can pierce the dragon’s hide) and hitting Smaug in a weak spot on his hide. The story moves on to where the company of Thorin Oakenshield (which includes thirteen dwarves, and is joined with one wizard and one hobbit) reclaim the mountain Erebor, the home of their ancestors. With the passing of time, word spreads across Middle-earth of Smaug’s death. Armies come from every corner to take back the gold that lies deep within the mountain.

After creating arguably one of the greatest fantasy films series of all time, The Hobbit trilogy is significantly worse than it’s predecessor, The Lord of the Rings. I love The Lord of the Rings, and thank goodness Peter Jackson didn’t make The Hobbit first because I never would’ve watched The Lord of the Rings if he had. The worst part about The Hobbit is that it diminishes the greatness of Peter Jackson’s earlier trilogy (the final movie in that trilogy, The Return of the King, actually won Best Picture along with ten other Oscars).

Peter Jackson has unfortunately become the new George Lucas, making his latter films worse than his originals. The thing that makes The Hobbit trilogy worse than The Lord of the Rings trilogy is that the films are stretched out into a nine hour trilogy, while Tolkien’s book was only three hundred pages long. Also, where’s Bilbo in this movie? After all, it is called The Hobbit. It seems that he appears and disappears out of the plot. For the main character, he doesn’t get a lot of screen time.

As for the action, The Battle of the Five Armies is creatively choreographed, but I feel that The Hobbit came out far too late after The Lord of the Rings. It kind of missed the boat, if you take my meaning. There’s so much CGI (Computer Generated Images) in The Hobbit that it doesn’t really have that Middle-earth feeling that Jackson created before. I mean, do we really need to see Legolas (Orlando Bloom) surf on bats or run on bricks as they’re falling. I mean, come on! Really?!

The Battle of the Five Armies does have some good qualities to it as well as the bad. Howard Shore’s score is beautiful and compelling, but never gets a chance to shine. The casting of Martin Freeman as the lead character Bilbo Baggins and the returning character of Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey was superb. Even though the movie doesn’t stick to the novel all that well, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh invent creative characters like Tauriel who Tolkien never though of adding into the book. The Hobbit, even without that Middle-earth feeling of The Lord of the Rings, makes the story of the Baggins family (Bilbo and Frodo) more complete than it would have been with just The Lord of the Rings.

Well, enough said, this movie falls short of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King by far. My last trip into Middle-earth didn’t end as well as I expected it to, but at least there’ll always be The Lord of the Rings.