Yeah, the first one was kind of like, "oh crap, we've made 4/5th of a kind of serious movie, time to fit in fifteen minutes of giant metal men beating the crud out of each other." felt kind of tacked on. But it didn't really change the narrative that much, you could pretty much cut to the final bit and still have it work. So I was really pretty impressed with it. I hadn't seen any of the trailers, so the whole thing took me by surprise. I liked how grounded it was, how seriously it took emotional consequences, without being gritty/grim dark. I think its still my favorite of the movies.