Dave -
the question wasn't meant to be purely academic. The reason I ask is because of how the first movie ended... or didn't. It seemed to me as the credits started rolling that it should have read "to be continued" or something. There just didn't seem to be resolution to much of anything that had happened. My thought was that maybe for those that know the whole story that the lack of resolution was acceptable, but for those of us who don't know the story it seemed to be incomplete. (I've found that when I'm stretching someone's brain I'm sometimes over-vague, usually because I don't want to ask leading questions - I want a response unbiased by my opinion.)

Ron - thanx to you too for answering that question. I hadn't meant to be excluding you, or anyone else, from my questions. I'd just been addressing them to Dave since he's the one who'd started the thread. So is the first movie based on The Hobbit? If you found the last quarter anticlimatic, could that explain why it seems to be left unresolved to me?