Not quite what I imagined

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 2013)

I read The Hobbit almost 40 years ago. I don't recall it that well, but I do remember a small, charming adventure story with an appealingly unsure protagonist and a really cool creature called Gollum.
Perhaps my impression of the book is wrong, because it bears very little resemblance to the CGI-fueled spectacle I just witnessed.
The movie begins with a long explanation of how the dwarfs lost their kingdom, and then a sequence with an elderly Bilbo Baggins writing his memoirs, and this surprised me, because I thought the book just got right into it. Since I have a copy (I'm thinking of reading it again at some point), I checked, and sure enough, the 13 minutes that begin the film have nothing to do with the beginning of the book.
It was a short book, but for reasons I presume have to do with making money it has been divided into three parts, the first of which is almost 3 hours long. But it all feels pretty padded; most scenes in the movie could be edited to half the length without any loss of sense. It as though they didn't want one dollar they spent on special effects to go for naught.
At an hour and a half, this would actually have been a pretty entertaining movie. It would begin well if you cut out that first unnecessary 13 minutes, the Gollum scene is fun, and while scenes of a small band of dwarfs taking on thousands of enemies struck me as ludicrous even in the confines of a fantasy story, I did really like those big birds that show up later. And it is nice to see Bilbo's personal evolution.
Here I must admit that I don't like the LOTR trilogy. I find them as slow and full of excess as I do this version of the Hobbit. But then, I feel the same way about the books, so I can accept that the movies reflect accurately what Tolkein was doing. Not so with The Hobbit. The Hobbit could have been turned into one entertaining two-hour movie, but I will leave it to others to slog through the rest of this newest trilogy.