To be honest, I'm not that big a fan of the LOTR movies yet I love all the memes that popped up about them far more. The problem with the LOTR movies, is the pacing and the fact that a lot of the books were about travelling. Travelling just doesn't translate well on-screen. In LOTR and The Hobbit, the descriptions of the world were so imaginative and detailed and while the movies sure tried, they couldn't capture the magic of the imagination.

Then the whole added love story and a few other annoyances added some more flaws to the whole. Still, they're pretty good Christmas movies to watch but not movies I would especially praise.

The new Star Wars trilogy had many of the same problems albeit far far worse: forced love story, adding stuff that just didn't feel right, changing what made the original so good, etc. but in the end you're left with movies which aren't BAD (except for the first one, it was shit) but ones you really wouldn't recommend and with elements which make you cringe just by thinking back to them.

I also found the Hobbit to have a better pacing than Fellowship (movies). The first time I saw Fellowship I was really bored. It has "the least" to offer for people who read the books, imo.

The Hobbit, otoh, as a book wasn't really Tolkiens greatest work and all the retcons didn't really work that well. But Jackson did a better job in trying to captures the middle-earth vibe. Not that difficult, considering he knew this was a middle earth movie from the start, unlike Tolkien when he wrote the book.

Also, I don't get the argument that the films are "stretched out". In the Hobbit, more is happening on those 200 pages than in the whole Fellowship (at least it feels that way). Drawing this a bit apart does actually help the narrative. And with the inclusion of the Necromancer and Radagast, there is plenty to film and tell.

I just wish it would have been slower. Too much action, imo.

I went to see it at the weekend, I didnt know it was only part one of a series, how the fuck do you make a series of three hour fims of a book as thin as the feckin hobbit, while it was pretty good, I did feel like kicking the cat when the credits suddenly started to roll.

Anyway, a lot of filler, christ I think they spent an hour in Bilbos house watching the dwarves eating and....SPOILER

.
.
.
.They are not real dwarves.

Anyway, I wont bother with the others in the series.

Review in a word?

Gandalf: "RUN!"

I enjoyed the movie and found it entertaining enough, even though I can relate to much of the criticism brought forward against it. I don't care that much that Jackson took some liberties with the lore, but the movie is a risky balancing act between the Hobbit and the LotR, between jolly and dark in a good sense and over-the-top silly and pathethically serious in a bad sense.

Contrary to other posters here, I absolutely adore the Hobbit book, maybe even more so than the LotR trilogy, and that is particularly due to the writing style and the affinity to children's stories and fairy tales that some LotR fans seem to dislike so much. Much of its essence is destroyed if you just take the plot and tell it in a different way, because the Hobbit is not an epic as LotR is. Now, the movie actually managed to capture the light-hearted essence in part, and it tried its best to reconcile it with the epic tone of the LotR movies, but the project to combine them is more or less doomed to fail in the first place. As someone else already said, as a result the Hobbit movie is not Bilbo's tale anymore. It suggests at first that Bilbo is telling the story, but then deviates from this course and shifts its focus on Gandalf and the dwarves. The threat of the dragon is overshadowed by the even greater threat of Sauron's return, and sometimes it's hard to tell which of these is the actual theme of the movie; Smaug as a climax doesn't really work anymore.

Still, even though they don't really fit in with the story of the Hobbit, I enjoyed these excursions into the background lore, because they made the known story more exciting and fresh. I also agree with SimonG though that more talking and walking would have been more enjoyable than all the added action scenes which weren't that credible and didn't make all that much sense anyway. I wasn't convinced by the orc villain subplot, because it was nothing but b-movie clichés. The movie also makes it all the more evident how often the Hobbit relies on deus ex machina solutions, partly by adding even more of them.

As I've said before, I'm not fond of the way the dwarves are split into serious warriors looking like downscaled humans and comic relief characters with totally different facial features, big ears and noses. I also don't like how they are portrayed as dignified cultured people in one scene, and a silly bunch of quaffing D&D dwarves with all their stereotypical dislike of elven food and music and whatnot in another. It may be good for a short chuckle, but it's inconsequential and not in the spirit of Tolkien's books, IMO. It's a good example of the movie's struggle to reconcile the tone of the children's book with the tone of the epic though, while trying to entertain a mixed audience mainly consisting of fantasy and RPG geeks on top of it ...

Anyway, all of this sounds so negative, but the truth is I had fun watching it. It might not be a very good movie on its own, but it's still good enough and better than most other movies of its kind and I think it's good entertainment if you're a fan of the books and the LotR movies. And this was the first movie where I didn't mind seeing it in 3D which must mean they've done something right, even though I think you won't miss all that much either seeing it in 2D.

Oh, Ian McKellen's performance is great as always, and Martin Freeman is the most credible hobbit ever (I just wish there had been a little more of him). :)

Finally watched it in the cinema yesterday. I have never read the book, and so I watched it yesterday without knowing anything about it, enjoyed the movie (and surprisingly managed not to leave during the middle of that long movie to take a leak :-P ), though I feel it is a bit inferior to LotR.

Okay, what Leroux said. Well put, and pretty much bang on to what I wanted to convey in my short and much less eloquent post.

I will probably suffer for this, but I thought it was awful. It suffered from the "More of the Same Syndrome" that the Matrix sequels had. I swear, after they left Rivendell I could barely tell if I was watching the Hobbit or the Fellowship of the Ring.... Camera shots, mountain tops, they all looked the same. And when the stone giants started fighting, the exact same Fellowship stuff goes down:

- Cling to the wall.
- Almost get buried.
- "ZOMG WE NEED TO GET SOMEWHERE SAFE!"
- Someone almost falls.
- Hobbits get insulted.

Then, there's the flashbacks - like three of them. Right one after the other at the beginning. Then the sidestepping to Radagast, who appears to come from the demented Disney region of Middle Earth for a reason that remains lost to us until 3/4s of the way through the movie.

Thorin's internal struggle is played the exact same way Aragorn's was in the trilogy.

The whole Goblin King underground action sequence was goofy. I'm okay with the idea that it needs to stay light for kids, but seriously if you don't have Johnny Depp the pirate captain you probably don't want a sequence that goofy. From physics-defying boulders that refuse to roll off of narrow paths to ladders that must have been made by the Elves from wood ripped out of living ents because they hold up so well, the scene was painful IMO.

Honestly, the whole thing felt forced. As a result, the humor felt hollow, the cameos of the Wizard's council felt like cameos, and the entire pacing of the movie was too slow. And this is coming from someone who prefers the extended versions of LotR, made midnight showings, has made costumes, and can point everyone in the direction of lesson plans for learning to speak Quenya (http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/qcourse.htm). The only scene that really stirred enjoyment in me was the riddle scene, and that was because the new CG allowed us to see more of Andy Serkis' brilliant performance as Gollum.

I will give it another shot when the extended version hits, but honestly that bar is set really low.

nvm, wrong corpse ;)