It's not adaptation - it's bastardization

Rating: 2/10 (26 December 2012)

I am bitterly disappointed by this film. It's noisy, jumbled, and chaotic, far too violent (it was a children's book, for heaven's sake!), and almost completely formless. The action sequences are just ridiculous, and what's worse is that they look fake - maybe an artifact of filming a 3D movie and then showing a 2D version, but something that you can't say of the LoTR movies. This was like a not very attractive cartoon.
Morevoer, even as stuffed to the gills as it is with material from Tolkien's appendices to LoTR and other things that should make the world come alive and draw you in to the back story, much of it doesn't makes sense. It's just a blitz of portentous talking between fights and chases. The acting may not be all bad, but nobody's even on screen long enough to actually act or is given anything to *do*. Ian McKellen's Gandalf has become a caricature and his performance no more than a collection of tics and mannerisms. Sylvester McCoy is embarrassing. At least half the dwarfs aren't' given enough actual acting time to create characters, which just makes the film even more cartoon-like.
Overall, watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was about as much fun as watching someone play World of Warcraft. I hate to say it, but even as someone who has been a scholarly Tolkien geek for decades, I may not bother to see the moves that are to follow. I'm afraid that may be a rather common reaction, too. Oh, well - maybe it will turn people toward reading the book (and Tolkien's other work) to see what the fuss was really about.