This is part 6 of an 8 movie series. It's an amazing adaption of an incredibly long, complicated book and it does an amazing job of capturing the story, sub plots and character development within a 2.5 hour movie format. It definitely displays the best acting of all the movies and provides the audience with reasons to feel for and love these characters again. I think it does stand on it's own as long as you can enjoy it as a story and not want to know more (although, isn't that the sign that this is an amazing series... that you do want to understand more of the whys and hows behind what you see on the screen?) Highly recommend to all ages!