Where to start?

Rating: 5/10 (15 December 2012)

Where to start with this?
Well I am going to start half an hour after the film, with the seasick feeling and the headache I had for the rest of the night. If 48fps is the future of cinema then cinema is finished. It did make the images and motion slightly clearer, but all that did was make it harder to get drawn into the film and afterwards it left me seasick.
Now to the film itself. There is the obvious problem that everyone was already aware of that such a small book doesn't warrant being stretched into such a long film, never mind three films. But the money men at the film companies obviously knew better so irrelevant distractions are shoe-horned in, long tracking shots are stretched to 5 times the length they need to be, the songs are stretched out .... And yet somehow the important sections which are genuine to the book (the trolls and the riddle game) still feel rushed through.
Some of the other quirks that annoyed me to varying degrees:

Orcs out in daylight 60 years before the Uruk-hai.

Dwarfs playing hackey-sack with the good china.

James Nesbit just being James Nesbit.

Most of the dwarfs being incidental despite the extra running time.

Gandalf's height going up and down compared to the other characters, even within scenes.

Saruman being so openly evil already, so much so that Galadriel and Gandalf sneak around behind his back.

The CGI being much too obvious. (The increased frames just made that look more obvious).

The storm giants were totally wasted.

Bilbo is meant to distract the trolls all night but he lasts about 20 seconds!

And how many of the shots were just stolen straight from LOTR. (All the tracking shots, the chase scene, all the Gollum close-ups. A decent editor and dubbing team could have built 80% of the movie from LOTR footage.)

I wanted to love this film but I have never been so disappointed. I have seen worse films (plenty of them) but I expected them to be worse. I have seen great directors try to be too clever on the back of their reputation and fail miserably (Avatar). I have seen books ruined by trying to squeeze them onto celluloid (Paycheck, Hunger Games). But never have I seen such awesome base material and a great director, and a great producer, turn out such rubbish.