The Hobbit trys to be something it's not.

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2013)

The Hobbit is a really good book, the Lord of the Rings is a much better book. LOTR is truly an Epic adventure having to do with the fate of all of Middle Earth. The Hobbit is an adventure about dwarfs trying to reclaim their home, their treasure and also kill a dragon. A nice big fun adventure, but not really Epic and not really on anywhere near the scale of LOTR.
Having read LOTR multiple times I felt that Peter Jackson truly captured the feeling and spirit of the book. Yes, there are some things I disagreed with in his movie adaption, but on the whole the movies were an amazing achievement.
Relatively speaking, Peter Jackson's adaptation of the Hobbit falls way short of what he was able to accomplish with LOTR. Jackson's efforts to make the Hobbit more epic are severely undercut by giving the action sequences a video game quality. In the Hobbit you are bombarded with too many scenes and actions sequences that strain credulity.
Sadly, the action sequences in the Hobbit film that take away from the experience were not even in the book. Further, the film's efforts to be "Epic" by making the Hobbit longer results in extended action sequences and extra plot elements that really take away from the story.
The result is a film adaptation that fails to capture the magic of the book that it is based on.
In the end the film adaptation of the Hobbit falls victim to a movie studio trying to recreate the financial success of LOTR by trying to artificially pump the Hobbit up into three really long films and it just doesn't really work.
Does this mean that the first of the three Hobbit films is is a bad film? No it is a pretty good film, but make no mistake that the Hobbit is not even in the same league as the Lord of the Rings.
I give the Hobbit a 7 because it is a fun film with good special effects. If I were grading it strictly on being a good film adaptation of the Hobbit I would drop it to a 5.