more bad than good, but A+s for Tim and Thorin

Rating: 6/10 (13 October 2013)

I mostly gave this movie the rating I did because Tim from The Office (British version) was GREAT, and Thorin was hot (and so were a few other less important dwarfs). And I always love Gollum. Other than that, there was not much to recommend this movie. Negatives:

3 hours to get only halfway through. - Lots of made up situations and people who were not in the book. Usual writer arrogance in thinking they can improve on authors like Tolkien. - Bilbo transformed from a very clever guy who got the dwarfs out of scrapes using his brain to a guy who charges a huge monster to save Thorin. - A scene with Cate Blanchett posing and talking so slowly she sounds like she's on mega doses of Xanax. The pompousness was off the charts. And basically she was saying to Gandalf, how ya doing? and he was saying, eh, I'm old, and so are you, but still you look pretty good. The worse thing with this director is how SERIOUSLY he takes the whole hobbit thing. Lighten up, guy. - Totally made up bad guy. - Overlong scene of the dwarfs coming to Bilbo's house in the beginning, and overlong exposition of Thorin fighting with the made up bad guy. - Overlong scenes of one frantic thing happening after another. My husband said he felt like he was watching Speed. - People falling down huge crevices in sheer rock and barely even picking up a bruise. No broken bones. No death. Ridiculous. - The ring falling onto Bilbo's finger from the air above. I could throw a ring in the air 9000 times and it would never once fall around any of my fingers. - Incredibly long - 3 hours and we're only HALFWAY THROUGH? Compare these bad things to the extreme positives of (1) Tim from The Office and (2) hotness of Thorin and a few subsidiary dwarfs, and you'll be surprised my rating was a 6. But those two things were good enough alone to merit that rating.