A redundant, disjointed mess..

Rating: 1/10 (25 December 2012)

Martin Freeman plays young Bilbo Baggins who's been given the role of Burglar in a quest to reclaim some hill once exploited by The Dwarfs that since long has been domiciled by a nasty dragon named Smaug. Bilbo wants no part of it but, without any motivation given, teams up anyway. The head scratching begins.
Not discussing the technical merits, the film is a complete disaster from beginning to end. Every bit of dialog is puerile, fake and contrived, not to mention progressing in the most clumsy, dragged out fashion imaginable. The incoherent plot lines lack any focus and there is no character development to compensate for it. Every scene is a copy of another scene that was copied from pick-your-installment of Lord of the Rings in which it was already a copy of some earlier scene. Every climax in those scenes ends with a deus ex machina subterfuge allowing our heroes to get away unharmed, no matter how ridiculous or insulting to the genre formerly known as Fantasy.
The film is simply a vehicle showcasing the technical improvements in CGI, 3D and recording techniques (the doubled frame rate) which oddly enough makes the actual picture seem completely unconvincing. All I saw was a bunch of dressed up, overpaid actors rehashing the lines they memorized for the scenes they were in. The added realism which is brought about by the 'improvements' in recording, garners the complete opposite of what is aimed for. Everything seems detached from what should be a steady canvas onto which a story is painted. And that would include the completely needless cameos by Weaving, Blanchett and the warmed up corpse of 90 year old Christopher Lee who looked as if a CGI version of his character might have been the more humane option to go with.
The 8.6 this marathon of nonsense currently presents itself with on IMDb defeats the purpose of having a rating system at all. Check the 'hated it' review section for future references for any film. It's probably the last resort to find an honest critical analysis for your movies.