a disappointing, evident money-grab

Rating: 5/10 (6 November 2013)

I was intrigued--yet concerned--to see producer Peter Jackson resurrecting the same cast of characters some ten years later to work on The Hobbit. I was even more concerned to behold that Jackson intended to stretch The Hobbit out to three overlong films, particularly since Tolkien's original work measures a scant 200 pages or so, compared to 1100+ pages for "Lord of the Rings." My concern was borne out when I suffered through The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Why does Bilbo not even meet Gollum--an episode that occurs early in the book--until the picture is three-fourths over? (Answer: Jackson had to inject umpteen largely irrelevant tales from Tolkien's "Silmarillion" to flesh out the picture, combined with rather unimpressive CGI animation (folks, we've seen it all before.) Where is the reasonably exciting, certainly entertaining, episode where the dwarfs are captured by the giant spiders? (Answer: I guess we have to wait until the sequel--or even the threequel.) This is commercialist greed at its worst. Some may like it, some may not, but Tolkien it's definitely not!