You'll have more fun reading the book

Rating: 1/10 (22 December 2012)

My wife and I are both Tolkien fans and met 10 years ago during our third visit to LOTR part 1. We both read The Hobbit, The LOTR and The Silmarillion.
We were a bit suspicious by Peter Jackson's choice to translate The Hobbit into a trilogy, but we decided to watch it for our anniversary anyway. We should have chosen to see Skyfall after all...
The LOTR trilogy captured the essence of the books - leaving out a few parts, and adding some extra spice. But at least for LOTR, Peter Jackson was justified in creating a trilogy.
In The Hobbit, PJ decided to twist nearly every aspect of the book in order to create a movie for the masses.
Only the broad story is followed. The details are way off, making place for unnecessary comic relief and overdone action scenes.
I am still amazed that, even though the script is a shallow excerpt of the book, PJ managed to create a three-hour long movie of the first six chapters... I could have read the book in those three hours and have a better time doing so.
I mean: 1 hour for the first chapter... I can read faster than that.
Only thing I liked (and which was more-or-less true to the book) was the Gollum scene in the cave, where PJ understandingly left out a few of the riddles to speed up the movie.
But I never noticed Azog the Goblin or Ragefast ever make an appearance in the book, other than maybe a footnote. To lift them to main characters, in my humble opinion, shows that they wanted this to become a Trilogy in order to steal our money.
Lifting Bilbo to heroic status by the end of the movie feels awkward as well... what is there left to achieve in the other two movies? Most of the budget must have gone into funding the 3D hype by the way, because CGI was awful, as was make-up on some of the dwarfs.