In the media pre-amble for The Battle Of The Five Armies, Peter Jackson revealed that the final chapter of The Hobbit was his favourite. Even then it sounded like marketing babble, but now, having seen the film, it's hard to not view it as an empty phrase trotted out because that was the film being pushed at the time. The final Middle-Earth wasn't that different to the previous Hobbit films - overlong, minimal narrative and questionable CGI - but as the end of the story that isn't enough. This was supposed the film where The Hobbit Trilogy would finally make sense. For two years everyone had sat through an endlessly meandering story that on the promise it'd all make sense come the end. And it doesn't. Just look at how it systematically negated The Desolation Of Smaug's ending. The cheap TV cliffhanger was wrapped up in a quick prologue and the long set-up Dol Guldur sub-plot was quickly swept aside. The latter is a particularly sore point. After providing an important through-line for the trilogy that tied it explicitly into The Lord Of The Rings, having the return of Sauron so unceremoniously under-cut revealed the whole expansion of that story thread for what it was - a cynical trick to get die-hard fans to keep coming back in the promise for more.
