The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

For its legions of fans, there’s a bittersweet sense of nostalgia that accompanies The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which marks the final voyage to Middle Earth for filmmaker Peter Jackson in his epic series of J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations.

The occasion isn’t lost on Jackson, whose concluding chapter to his trilogy based on Tolkien’s The Hobbit is better than its two predecessors. It’s both thrilling and emotionally fulfilling, especially for moviegoers who have already invested more than 15 hours over the past 13 years in the first five installments (counting his Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, of course).

It helps to have seen the prior two films beforehand, since this one generally picks up where the last one left off. The reason for the military-style conflict is the abundance of riches hidden inside a mountain that has been abandoned by the terrifying dragon Smaug.

Feisty hobbit Bilbo (Martin Freeman) and his dwarf friends are the first to lay claim to the gold, and they have a pragmatic reason for doing so. But others try to capitalize as well, including greedy prince Thorin (Richard Armitage), elves Thranduil (Lee Pace) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom), a sharpshooting human hero (Luke Evans), and a massive collection of intimidating orcs.

Along the way, loyalties shift while powers are acquired and lost. And the wise wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) tries to find a path to peace with destruction all around.

As expected, Five Armies is visually stunning – from its cinematography to its makeup and costumes to its 3D effects – but despite its technical achievements, this trilogy remains inferior to its predecessor. Part of the reason, of course, is there’s less source material to draw from, namely one book instead of three.

So as with the other two Hobbit films, this one is stuffed with trumped-up action sequences and employs a video-game mentality, without much attention actually paid to the hobbits themselves. The bulk of the story serves to set up an extended climactic showdown as the title suggests, and the resilient underdog hero tends to get lost amid the chaos.

Still, even if the script sacrifices some context for spectacle, many of these characters feel like old friends by now to series devotees, and that’s the target audience here. For them, Jackson delivers a crowd-pleasing finale.

Rated PG-13, 144 minutes.