Fantastic visuals, shame about the story...

Rating: 4/10 (13 December 2012)

Wow, just got back from seeing it and I can't believe how boring it was!
I was SO ready to be amazed but I honestly felt myself nodding off a few times. Production-wise, everything was amazing. The visuals are stunningly beautiful and some of the CGI work is fantastically realised. The plot however... is really bad. Is The Hobbit a well-received book? Because the storyline was absolutely awful in this film! A bunch of guys go on a journey and face run-of-the-mill obstacles. That's pretty much it. Maybe it's because I have zero interest in this kind of fantasy (Although I like the LOTR trilogy) but seriously, how do people find this story interesting? Every situation they were in there was a sudden way out, every time someone was in danger there was a character at the ready to save them, every time someone was trapped they suddenly found something to help them escape. This is my problem with fantasy, the writers can always just think up ANYTHING to get ANYONE out of ANY situation. I mean, not once did I ever doubt that anything bad would happen to these characters.
The only part of the film I will praise is the segment with Gollum. My eyes were glued to the screen for that part. But everything else bored me. There were dwarfs/dwarfs with only 1 line in the entire film and the change in Bilbo Baggins happens so quickly it's hard to know if he's the same person at the end of the film. I saw no gradual change in him, just a sudden need for a character to be saved at the end and for Baggins to be that very saviour. Oh and since when does Middle Earth have chips??? Oh, I could go on and on but I'm probably in the 1% that doesn't like it.
I'm giving it 4 stars for the effort put into the visuals, nd for that scene with Gollum. This is just my opinion and review of the film, feel free to disagree.