I just returned from a night showing of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. It’s important to note that it was a late screening because it’s currently five past midnight and I’m still impassioned to write this. While I want to say that this film left a better taste in my mouth than the previous Hobbit installment, I can’t say that it did. From unnecessary plot elements, to poor scriptwriting (at best), to an overuse of CGI, to starting this film where the last one should have ended — this one was a doozy. Although the whole film wasn’t a dud, some scenes even newly added ones stood out, it failed most of all to tell the story of a hobbit.

*Obviously some spoilers ahead

A really wonderful scene in the movie was when a watery eyed Balin explains to Bilbo that Thorin has fallen to “dragon sickness;” the wealth of gold stored in the depths of Erebor has corrupted his very soul. In a lot of ways, this is a great metaphor for the existence of all three of these Hobbit movies. I wish that I had a good explanation for why the shortest of the four main books centered around the One Ring, had to be divided into three movies — especially considering its predecessors were able to stick to one book per film—but really it boils down to one thing: gold. Just as Thorin’s compatriots were saddened and angered by his complacency under the spell of greed, I too felt helpless watching this King of a story crumble in front of me on the screen.

I wanted these movies to be good. I grew up like so many others, having the Hobbit read to me and I was hooked. I watched the roughly animated 1977 adaptation over and over again, and even though that movie does deviate from the plot (but what adaptation doesn’t) it still told the story of unlikely hero: Bilbo Baggins. As I got older, and read the book for myself, Bilbo’s use of wit over steel was amazing to me — if even possible, he became braver and stronger in my mind’s eye. So I have to wonder when this theatrical re-telling of the story stopped being Bilbo’s journey. Was it after he “fooled” the dragon under the mountain in order to take the arkenstone? Or was it long before that, when The Desolation of Smaug began with Thorin’s call to action?

Whenever that moment happened, the overarching problem with these films was that they lost sight of who the hero really was. This was not supposed to be a story about a king reclaiming his throne, not really. That story is told, just in the trilogy of books to follow. The Hobbit is supposed to outline for us all the qualities of a great hero in the least assuming one possible.