Good visuals, predictable narrative, unconvincing acting

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2012)

I read The Hobbit many years ago (well before the Lord if the Rings, the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc) but I had a somewhat different picture in my mind as to what a movie adaptation would be like. Yes, Tolkien had re-written it to fit it to his Middle-Earth mythology but I had the impression The Hobbit was mainly a nice and sometimes funny kids story.
This movie is not and I don't think I would bring my kids to watch it. It is Lord of Rings in high frame rate and 3D packed with more actions scenes and violence. And I think that it is a very weak point. While I do enjoy 3D, and the HFR was not a problem to me (my wife got a headache ...), I think that the movie narrative has borrowed way too much from LOTR #1. It felt like Peter Jackson picked the LOTR1 storyboard and force-fitted The Hobbit story into it.
And to be honest, I don't see the point of making 3 long movies out of this story. A single movie, even 3 hours long, would have been enough.
But, being a fan of Tolkien, I still enjoyed most of it except for the extra bits that are not part of the book. I also had the weird impression like the LOTR actors who played in The Hobbit felt like they had to dust off and wear old clothes/ costumes / whigs that hey had happily gotten rid of 10 years ago ... just my impression but I did not find them very convincing. The world has moved on since LOTR and The Hobbit felt too much like a rehash of an old recipe the taste of which is no longer so fancy ...