Action Adventure remake of the Hobbit - though with some good bits

Rating: Null/10 (17 January 2014)

Very minor spoilers here.
Did have some good bits. The dwarfs' song was great. It should have had many more songs - all the characters sing, just about, in the original. Martin Freeman was excellent as the hobbit. Galadriel was good also.
Wasn't much like the Hobbit in the action sequences. Instead it made me think of Lara Croft Tomb Raider. Lots of death defying stunts - which would indeed kill anyone except invulnerable computer game characters, and those action sequences seem to go on and on for minutes on end.
I ended up skipping through the longer action sequences, e.g. most of the section in the goblin's city. Was just too unlike the Hobbit.
I'm a major Tolkien geek, read just about everything he wrote including most of his son's many compilations of his drafts.
The film just departed too far from the book. Lost the philosophy and a lot of what gave it its sparkle.
I might watch it again, but this time not think of it as the Hobbit but rather as an action adventure film, like Lara Croft. Then it might be more fun to watch.
The thing is I don't think the Hobbit is an action adventure. Is partly a comedy. Also a bit of a fantasy. Also a bit like a musical because of all the songs the characters sing.
Don't know how you would put it into film, but not just pure action adventure anyway.
It might just need a bit of supervision, not sure who from, light supervision e.g. from Christopher Tolkien perhaps, similar role to a science adviser on a science fiction movie. Like the way that J.K. Rowling lightly supervised the Harry Potter movies - not exact copies of the books but preserving the essential characteristics of them.
The sets were great though especially Hobbiton. Rivendel was also quite good, the goblin city not so good in my view just stretched credibility too far to be believable as a goblin city, and the stone giants weren't at all as described in the book where they were much further away, certainly not have the dwarfs walking over them.