Thanks for the Video Game. When is the Movie coming out?

Rating: 4/10 (29 March 2013)

Everyone expected The Hobbit to be a different movie from LOTR. LOTR is dark and sombre. The Hobbit is a children's book, albeit one that appeals to adults. We were expecting a lighter movie. What we got was a mess.
Jackson has made major changes to the book. That in itself isn't a bad: The LOTR book had weaknesses that Jackson's screenplay fixed, but the Hobbit was already a good "film size" book that didn't need changes. Jackson's rewrites, aimed at stretching a short book into three overly long films, ruined a good story.
An example is the addition of the White Orc whose gang chase the dwarfs everywhere. This boring, 1-dimensional villain gives an excuse for additional fight scenes, but these are emotionally unengaging. You never feel that anything is at stake.
Some have said Jackson had to stick to the source material. The thing is, he didn't. Everything has been rewritten into a fight scene. We have the absurdity at Trollshaws that the dwarfs attack the trolls, but then we wouldn't have Gandalf's iconic line "Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!" So the dwarfs put down their weapons and crawl into sacks to be eaten. LOLWOT? Gandalf's voice throwing is cut from the film, replaced with some unfunny dialog about worms. It doesn't add anything. It's not funny. It's change purely for the sake of change.
It's not like Jackson lightened it up to make it more appealing to kids: There is a lot of violence (e.g. Gandalf stabs the goblin king in the eye then slashes his belly open). Jackson just doesn't show any blood. No blood = kids movie. Got it?
Jackson added other tie-ins to the LOTR to try and pad the story out, but like the unnecessary cameos they will only make you groan. Jackson now even suggests Gandalf orchestrated the dwarf journey as a deliberate precursor to LOTR, as if he had an instinct that Bilbo would find the ring. It really makes no sense.
Dol Guldur was a wonderfully creepy place in the LOTR books, although it never appeared in the Hobbit. Jackson has Radaghast, a supposedly powerful wizard show up, flee in a panic after he sees a ghost. A ghost that can't even swing a sword. It just doesn't make sense. And then there is Radaghast's rabbit sled. Again not in the book. It's not funny. It's just stupid.
Much like George Lucas' flying R2D2, Jackson has changed characters. When Saruman and Gandalf fight in LOTR Jackson said he didn't want anything clichéd like Wizard Lightning. Yet in the Hobbit Gandalf's flash of light suddenly becomes a fireball killing hundreds of goblins at a time. Well gee Gandalf. Why didn't you tell us you could do that?
Jackson's elves have never looked like elves in any movie: More like blonde people with pointy ears, but in LOTR his dwarfs looked like dwarfs. In The Hobbit most of the dwarfs look like humans. Ridiculously Aragon... sorry, Thorin ... is man candy for female cinema-goers. What do you think, ladies? Come for the disembowelments? Stay for the romance? Like the whole Liv Tyler character he wrote into LOTR, it just doesn't work. Jackson needs to do a few romcoms to get it out of his system.
The CGI is very overdone. Characters fall from great heights. They get squashed by rocks. They walk away without a scratch. It feels a lot like a video game. You never feel emotionally invested. If Jackson must do rewrites, he should have killed some of the dwarfs. There are 13 of them after all, and losing a couple would have helped the audience care more about the ones that are left.
In the book the goblins lived in tunnels. In the movie they live in absurdly overdone CGI caverns. Someone needs to tell Jackson sometimes less is more.
How did Jackson, a director with such a good track record, make such a bad movie? Sometimes directors come out with good movies (e.g. George Lucas) and we think they are the hand of god. But then they come out with more movies, and you wonder if there isn't some luck involved or uncredited people in the background who weren't there this time? Jackson's King Kong shows not everything he touches turns to gold. Jackson is obviously overconfident, and the studio was too, but like George Lucas even if Jackson laid a steaming turd it would still make been hugely profitable. We've already hailed Jackson a genius, so he has nothing to prove to us except to make a lot of money. He's also very into video games. This movie feels very much like a video game.
The only good parts in this movie: Smaug's raid at the beginning, and Gollum's riddle scene. For 15 minutes out of 3 hours you will be entertained. The rest is slow, boring and emotionally unengaging; silly without being funny. The CGI is overdone. Being a Middle Earth story many people will see the movie anyway, and most will be disappointed.