Like seeing old friends

Rating: 9/10 (21 December 2012)

Before I went to the cinema I heard some negative reviews and opinions on this movie so I expected three hours of boredom but fortunately I was wrong. There are of course some things that deserve criticism when it comes to battles in which our heroes kill hundreds of enemies without a scratch but that is no different from LOTR and some slapstick humour, and it is a young adults story so it's OK. I know some viewers expected realistic battles without character shields, like in Game of Thrones" but The Hobbit" was written in some other time. First of all this is a feel-good movie. It was nice to see some characters from LOTR and as before the photography and scenery is beautiful. In this movie the focus is on the dwarfs, the race we have seen too little of in LOTR. And at first glance they did not seem interesting enough to explore them more deeply, but in this movie we have tragic story of dwarfs of Erebor who now live homeless in exile and dream to return to their home which has been taken over by a vicious dragon Smaug, a foe against whom there is no defense. This movie is about their quest to reclaim Erebor. There are some moments in the movie which seemed cringeworthy like dwarf songs but it is after all a part of their character and after you hear Under the Misty Mountain cold" you will feel how tragic and sad their are. Another point which is to be criticized is some misplaced slapstick humour concerning Trolls. They are shown like the three Stooges and frankly I never thought of them so. They are slow-minded and stupid but very dangerous in battle as we have seen in LOTR. And the Goblin King is ridiculous. He is to eloquent for his lot and not threatening at all. And he also dies stupidly. We also have a new wizard – Radagast the Brown – who is shown wonderfully eccentric. The battles are dynamic and cool but suffer from old movie clichés like character shield", almost lethal weapons", hero killer", conservation of ninjutsu", suspension of disbelief", made of iron" etc. When the main character (in this case Thorin Oakenshield) believes that his main antagonist is dead we know he is wrong, and the hero is almost invulnerable except when he meets his main enemy (in this case Azog the Defiler). But this things aside, it is fun to watch goblins being killed by hundreds . The scene with Gollum was fun but I don't think we will be seeing him in a sequel. It was cool to see Saruman as good guy in the meeting in Rivendel with Galadriel and Elrond. We see some hints to his ignorance which will be his doom in LOTR. And of course, we have the Necromancer storyline, which will hopefully be explored deeper then in the book. All in all, it is a fun movie and you will be surprised by how quickly it ends.