The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the last installment of six movies set in J. R. R. Tolkien’s popular Middle Earth.

The three Hobbit movies are prequels to the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and were directed by Peter Jackson. The Battle of the Five Armies made over $54 million its opening weekend.

The Hobbit movies have followed a young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) as he breaks out of his safe but uneventful life to help a band of dwarves as they try to reclaim the Misty Mountain from the great red dragon Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch), who stole it from their fathers.

Over the course of their journey, they must face dangers like Azog (Manu Bennett), a white Orc who wants nothing more than to see Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), the leader of the company of dwarves, dead. Joining Azog in impeding the company are goblins, Wood Elves, and giant spiders, just to name a few.

Bilbo, after being separated from the dwarves, had found a ring that granted him the power to become invisible. The creature Gollum (Andy Serkis) had dropped the ring. It proved useful to Bilbo on many occasions, such as evading Smaug’s detection.

The Battle of the Five Armies started off just where The Desolation of Smaug left off: with a furious Smaug soaring toward the town of Dale to destroy it and its inhabitants for daring to send the dwarves to his mountain.

I had seen the other two movies, and was unimpressed with how much CG–computer graphics–was in them, the Desolation of Smaug especially. And, while this newest movie was also full of CG, I felt that it was used better. Nothing was so unrealistic as the barrel chase in the Desolation of Smaug.

I read The Hobbit a few years ago, and while I enjoyed the Hobbit movies, they deviated greatly from the book. Many characters and events that never even happened in the book are important in the movies.

Overall, however, I thought that The Battle of the Five Armies was better than Desolation of Smaug and worth your time to see. The visual effects and sets were stunning, the acting was realistic, and the characters were, for the most part, believable. I recommend watching this movie and its predecessors.