An Unrequired Epic

Rating: 7/10 (22 December 2012)

I am a longtime Tolkien fan who likely read most of his works before most of the posters here were born. Peter Jackson did an absolutely superb job bringing LOTR to the screen, due in large part to sticking very closely to Tolkien's work. (Okay, Arwen got inserted to provide a love interest, but she replaced Glorfindel in part.) And while LOTR may be both my favorite novel and film, I wouldn't say I'm a Jackson/Tolkien fanboy as many here appear to be with their 10 of 10 scores.
Given the success of LOTR by sticking to the story, I was nervous when I heard The Hobbit would also be a trilogy. Show me the money! The Hobbit is shorter than any of the 3 LOTR volumes. More importantly, it's told in an entirely different way. The Hobbit is a fairy tale, told breezily with large sections of narration. Its dwarfs are largely comical. LOTR though is an epic, deep in setting, detail, and dialogue. Still, because of the breeziness (e.g. important events are covered in a few pages, the narrator intentionally skipping forward intentionally in some places) I had hopes that Jackson's understanding of Tolkien would compensate.
Did he? I must say, a mixed bag there. Certainly borrowing the settings, cinematography, tone, music, etc. from LOTR helped. Freeman's Bilbo matches Tolkien's pretty well, a simple fellow thrown into an adventure. The initial scene with the history of Smaug was a good way to give context to what follows. Whenever Jackson is sticking with Tolkien, things are great such as Gollum's scene.
When Jackson is on his own though, the film drags. Jackson had to mine every reference and back story for additional screen time. It's safe to say than when a character not in the book is on screen, something ain't right. Radagast, Galadriel, Saruman, and CGI Azog add little. Moreover, the battle scenes are excessive in the extreme. In the book, there as no fight with the trolls nor with orcs approaching Rivendell. The "main" fight with the Great Goblin was over pretty quickly, with the dwarfs needing to flee rather than fight. That all 14 continuously and miraculously escape unharmed from multiple situations drains all the drama. (Just the fall into Goblintown should have killed them all.) But Jackson has to have his CGI/video game fun, even though this too is filler.
All in all, The Hobbit is not a bad film. Go see it. But it would have been better had Jackson told the tale it in just two films, sticking to Tolkien and thus the success formula for LOTR.