Why didn't the eagles take the dwarfs to Lonely Mountain?

Rating: 1/10 (20 December 2012)

Yes, this film is so repetitive, it even repeats the same plot holes from LOTR. We have seen it all before: the vargs, the elves, the battles, the goblin infested caves, those countless closeups of Gandalf's face as he stares with a mixture of concern, joy, and philosophical insight. I'd like to ask McKellan what he thinks of when Peter Jackson asks him: Hey, mate, can you do the 'face' again for the closeup?
Another problem with The Hobbit is the style. The book was written before LOTR and it had an entirely different tone. It was a book written for children that had singing goblins and talking dragons. However, the film does not fully acknowledge this fact, trying desperately to maintain stylistic continuity with the LOTR films. Thus it has both flying rabbits and dwarfs that spontaneously invent a song about Bilbo on the one hand, and savage slaughter involving decapitation, limb removal, and a monster from the movie '300' on the other. This constant shift of tone leaves the audience confused and unable to connect, never knowing whether the scene will end with someone getting a pie thrown in their face or having a limb chopped off.
But the main problem with the film is storytelling and character development. The storytelling is confused. Scene transitions are often clumsy and it appears that the characters end up in the same situation time and again. If someone asked me to retell the plot I could not do it. I remember similar chase scenes, I remember them running away, and I remember they ended up in some cave several times, but that is about it. I also remember a scene where vargs chase a sleigh pulled by rabbits while the rest of them play hide-and-seek with the orcs. That could be the most confusing scene in film history. I don't know whether to blame it on poor direction or poor editing.
But to get to the characters: they are simply not well developed. Obviously when one has thirteen of them it is very hard to bring them all to life and make us care for them, but when you decide to make THREE films in a row about a story that could have been told in one, you better spend time making the audience learn about the characters and empathize with them. I would have preferred more scenes about the dwarfs and fewer scenes involving wizards exchanging pointless lines in Rivendell. The bottom line is that I never once felt concerned about the fate of any of these characters, including Bilbo. They resembled characters in a video game, and as we see them fighting goblins in their cave at the end, the whole thing becomes literally indistinguishable from a game. Jackson forgets that the one thing films CAN and MUST do is create strong characters and make us empathize with them. Big action scenes can now be created by a computer, and they do not impress. It always comes down to characters and frankly someone should have pointed this out to Jackson even as he was making LOTR because it suffered from the same problem. Case in point: Martin Freeman as Bilbo. He is a good actor and he is great at playing the insecure, awkward type. Yet he is given too little to work with, and frankly when he is given center stage he is not given any good lines.
As for the use of 3D and and double frame rate, it ends up demolishing anything that was left of the film. The 3D looks cheap and childish, ruining the persuasiveness of the image rather than increasing it; and the 48 fps rate creates an image that is more similar to video than film, making the Hobbit seem like fan fiction. This amateurish feel is strengthened by confusing storytelling. At times the film comes across as a TV series, with a focus on individual scenes and not enough concern for the whole.
Final verdict: I actually enjoyed the bits with the wizard on a sleigh the most in this entire film, and that should not have been the case. Sack the screenwriter, the director, and the editor before you make a sequel.
And never ever use 48fps again.