If there's one criticism you could level at The Lord of the Rings trilogy which wasn't the fault of the filmmakers, it is the amount of exposition featured in the movies. Anyone who has read J. R. R. Tolkien's books knows full well that they are laden with heavy exposition from start to finish. That The Hobbit movies suffer from a similar problem is perhaps less forgivable - notwithstanding the fact that the source material is considerably lighter than The Lord of the Rings, we'd have expected Peter Jackson and his co-writers to have learned from their previous experiences and been able to streamline the storytelling for their new films. There's an old maxim in movie making that, had they stuck to it a little more closely, The Hobbit movies would have flowed more effortlessly - that maxim is show don't tell. Instead we're given more exposition than we need, and the result leaves us with more than a few meandering scenes we could've done without.
