With The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, filmmaker Peter Jackson concludes his time on Middle Earth in suitably grand, battle heavy fashion, even though the soul and spirit of J.R.R Tolkien’s words have been eroded to mere name recognition.

Tolkien fans and novices know that 3 films (consisting of nearly 9 hours) to adapt 300 odd pages of classic children’s fantasy novel “The Hobbit” is overkill of mass proportions. Yet it’s clear now after watching The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies that director/ writer/ producer/ exploiter (depending on your mood) Peter Jackson wanted to not only create a prequel series, but a bridge to his seminal work, The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

It’s a goal that has backfired. While The Hobbit series is terrifically entertaining action fantasy, it strays so far away from Tolkien’s strong spirituality that made the Lord of the Rings trilogy so exceptional, that shallowness cannot help but fester after the visual spectacular of Jackson’s filmmaking wears off. It’s no coincidence that where the release of each Lord of the Rings movie improved upon the other, that the quality of The Hobbit films depreciated with every release.

Now although The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the weakest in Jackson’s Middle Earth saga, it still stands tall over other movies of its ilk. Jackson has cemented his reputation as a world builder who can absorb his audience into his visually spectacular creations, that are filled with memorable characters and creatures who collide in a battle between Good and Evil. Where Jackson does fail The Hobbit series on a narrative level (more on that to come), he still manages to make the stakes feel palpable.

Continuing from the second Hobbit entry The Desolation of Smaug, Jackson begins his …Battle of the Five Armies with awakened and super-pissed dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) laying fiery waste to the fishing village of Laketown. From there all matter of alliances, betrayals and battles take place as opportunity to claim the great Lonely Mountain (the once great kingdom of the dwarves which Smaug declared his own) and the treasures within draw man, dwarf, elf and orc into fierce battle. Caught in the middle is adventuring Hobbit, Bilbo (Martin Freeman).

Huge in the success of all these films is the work by Weta Digital and Weta Workshop, the visual effects and special effects houses co-founded by Jackson, who once again do a great job in bringing Tolkien’s creation to life. While there are moments when …The Battle of the Five Armies does resemble an interactive videogame, so strong is Jackson’s handling of effects heavy cinema and his staging of battle sequences, that such comparisons can be forgiven.

What cannot is Jackson’s handle on narrative, where just like The Desolation of Smaug before it, the straying from Tolkien’s finely drawn path in order to fill unnecessary screen time with redundant characters and their thin plot-points causing needless distraction.

As such, it is easy and right to label Jackson’s Hobbit series as a failure when compared to the majesty which is The Lord of the Rings series. Yet while Jackson could not reach the bar set a decade earlier by his own hands, his shortcomings are still more impressive and entertaining than the majority of adventure fantasy movies that have come and gone.