Before going forward, an important spoiler warning: this article assumes that you've seen all of the Hobbit films and read the book and takes no pains to avoid spoilers for any of it. It also includes lighter spoilers for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and season two of HBO's Game of Thrones. If you haven't read the books or seen the movie and want to be surprised, do not pass beyond this point.

It's a damn shame that the three Hobbit films feature so little of the titular hobbit.

Martin Freeman has established himself as a quietly great actor with serious dramatic and comedic chops, and his scenes in these movies have consistently been the best thing about the films. Bilbo Baggins is the only character capable of eliciting genuine reactions from the audience, which is what Peter Jackson's bloated Hobbit trilogy needed more than anything—Bilbo's scenes form the kernel of what could have been a smaller, quieter, but ultimately more narratively successful series of films, one where Bilbo's personal journey isn't swallowed whole by loud Lord of the Rings-style battle sequences.

Other than Freeman's wonderful, quiet little scenes and a bare handful of others, Battle of the Five Armies is one big two-hour-and-24-minute-long argument against splitting the book up into three films.

Loose threads and manufactured conflict

The Desolation of Smaug, the second of the three movies, was probably the one that strayed farthest afield from the source material. It invented several characters and showed situations that either didn't exist in the book or happened "off-screen" and were explained later.

Inventing stuff is fine—the first movie suffered in part because it followed the events of the book too closely even when they made for poor viewing—but so much of what happened in the second movie is cast aside in the third movie that one wonders why the diversions were made in the first place. Gandalf's journey to the fortress of Dol Guldur to face down Sauron eats up a lot of screen time in the second movie, but he's quickly freed in the third movie in a weird, trippy action sequence.

The movie could have used much less time to fit this in—in the book, the entire story is relayed to Bilbo in just a few paragraphs—but instead it just feels like an empty excuse to get Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Christopher Lee on-screen again. The side-plot wastes time and distracts from the action in the second movie, and the payoff in this film does little to justify the entire sequence.

And then there's Tauriel, an elf played by Evangeline Lilly who was created specifically for the movie. In Desolation of Smaug she was a welcome if not stupendously compelling addition to a male-dominated cast (hell, a male-dominated fictional universe). In Battle of the Five Armies, though, she goes into Damsel Mode, occasionally fighting alongside the rest of the characters but more often making moon-eyes at (or crying about the death of) Kili. She ultimately ends up as a two-dimensional love interest introduced not because Tolkien's universe has so few women in it, but because one of the male characters needed a love interest.

The movie spends way more time on Thranduil, a moody, brooding Elven-King in a movie with no shortage of moody, brooding characters. Thranduil and Thorin are both walking bummers, and their vague implacable unhappiness is used mostly to pad the movie out. Movie-Thranduil hates dwarves to distraction, and way too much time is spent convincing (and re-convincing, and re-convincing) him to join the dwarves and fight the orcs.

Ditto Thorin, who hides in the Lonely Mountain and broods over his "dragon sickness" for a long, long time after the movie has made its point. The audience has to sit through multiple scenes in which Thorin alternatively broods, accuses his followers of betrayal, and threatens to throw Bilbo over a wall. You, the movie-going public, already know that Thorin is going to get over it and go fight for his homeland whether you're familiar with this particular story or not—how many PG-13 fantasy films let their deuteragonist sit behind a wall while his friends and kin are slaughtered by orcs? But Thorin takes forever to get there, and his eventual revelation is both uninspired and goofy looking (he hallucinates that he's sinking into a pool of molten gold, and it's far from Weta Digital's best work).

Boring action borne of boring characters

Smaug the dragon was one of the more successful parts of the second movie, and though he's shot down by Bard about five minutes into Battle of the Five Armies, his torching of Laketown is probably the third film's best action sequence. That's really bad, because this movie is called "Battle of the Five Armies" and it's mostly action sequence. Well, it's mostly action sequence once you wade through the endless parade of scenes where leaders marshal their armies for the action sequence.

The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches. Were you worried that the elves wouldn't help out the dwarves? Well, it's cool, because at the last possible second you'll see that there was nothing to worry about! Does it look like our heroes are turning the tide? Oh no! Here come more orcs and flying war bats and stuff to set them back! Did you think that orc died when he sank down into the frozen lake? Don't worry, he will open his eyes at the last possible second and spring out of the ice just like he's supposed to! And you won't miss any of it, because every moment of any import is shown in glorious, runtime-padding slow-mo.

Listen: battle sequences can be fun to watch, and if you want to include a few fancy visual effects, then great, whatever. But they work best if you spend the bulk of your time zoomed in on a few characters, preferably ones that you have some kind of emotional connection to. That last thing is what the Hobbit films in general have had the most trouble with.

Two examples: the first is the battle at Helm's Deep in the Two Towers movie. It's another fight where the tide is turned by reinforcements that arrive just as things look bleakest, but it doesn't feel as bland or predictable as the stuff in Battle of the Five Armies. Having our heroes hemmed in and defending a small fortress under siege makes the endless flood of orcs more menacing. Legolas and Gimli provide light comic relief that mostly works, and both Aragorn and Theoden are given opportunities to grow as characters and as leaders. It's got some variety and some emotional payoff that blends in with the action, creating actual tension where Battle of the Five Armies has none.

Second example: "Blackwater," the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones' second season. There's a fair amount of straightforward battling here, and the episode's most enduring image is the giant green explosion that engulfs much of Stannis Baratheon's fleet. But what makes the episode one of the series' all-time best are the breaks from the action, breaks where stories that have been brewing all season finally come to a head. Joffrey Baratheon, the spoiled and entitled boy-king, is given a chance to redeem himself and fails the test; Tyrion Lannister, overlooked and unloved, is briefly recognized as the shrewd, capable leader that he is. And Cersei Lannister is a mean drunk who's far less in control of events than she would like to be.

Battle of the Five Armies' attempts to connect with the audience, by contrast, mostly fall flat. When walking-bummer Thorin Oakenshield meets his cousin Dain Ironfoot on the battlefield, we don't care, because Thorin up to this point has been unsympathetic and one-note, and we only just met Dain a few moments before (the sum total of things we know about him: is Thorin's cousin; is a Scottish stereotype; rides a pig). When Bard's kids manage to get themselves into trouble, we don't care, because the kids are barely developed at all and Bard comes off as a blandly heroic Diet Aragorn. Tauriel is so underdeveloped that you can't muster the energy to mourn Kili's death alongside her (it doesn't help that Kili's slow-mo death sequence feels like it's 37 minutes long). The one exception, again, is Bilbo—you buy how much he cares about Thorin, even if you can't care about Thorin all that much yourself.

In the absence of good characters, Battle of the Five Armies just becomes so many CGI characters fighting amongst themselves on a computer-rendered battlefield. It's about as cold and soulless as it sounds.

There and back again

There are other problems. Everyone in this movie takes themselves way too seriously, which makes them even harder to sympathize with. Peter Jackson leans way too hard on voice modulation to make characters seem menacing or powerful. The movie's tone is still way out of step with the book's tone. But it's time to wrap up before this article becomes as long and overwrought as The Hobbit films. What am I left with two years, three movie tickets, and $50 later? What's the final verdict, now that the story is complete?

These movies aren't Star Wars prequel-level unredeemable, but both as a follow up to the Lord of the Rings movies and an adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, this new trilogy misses the mark in just about every possible way. Efforts to recapture LOTR's sweeping, world-in-the-balance epic-ness fall flat, and the movies' collective take on The Hobbit's light humor are often too silly and broad to elicit genuine laughs. The third movie in particular is a plodding, self-serious affair, and the entire trilogy has far less to say than its combined eight-hour running time would suggest.

These movies were made by professionals with lots of experience—many of the same professionals who brought you the Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings films, and there's a lot of talent in front of and behind the camera. I'm not going to spend time complaining about Orlando Bloom's Legolas, who doesn't need to be around but serves as a mostly unobjectionable thread to tie the prequel trilogy and the original trilogy together. Nor can I lay the blame upon any particular actor—like the aforementioned Star Wars movies, the Hobbit films are full of talented performers doing the best they can with the material they're given.

There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset—the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children's novel into three feature-length prequel films.

What these movies desperately need are boundaries, reasons to condense scenes or cut them out entirely instead of reasons to pile on more. Chopping these down into a pair of two-and-a-half hour movies would drastically improve the pacing even if you didn't address the characterization or the tone issues. You could leave around three hours of slow-motion action sequences, goblin chases, and Radagast the Brown on the cutting room floor! Sounds great, doesn't it?