Really wanted to love this

Rating: 5/10 (18 December 2012)

As a multi-occasion reader of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series and with literally dozens of viewings of Jackson's initial masterpiece, I had been anticipating this one since the time when we were told del Toro would be directing. I bought reserved tickets 5 weeks in advance and waited eagerly. Well, I just returned from this Unexpected Journey, and I can tell you that the journey I was taken on was definitely unexpected.
Throughout the film it seems Jackson can't decide if this is a Disney comedy, a rehashing of Lion/Witch/Wardrobe, or a gruesome medieval action movie. To that end, we were handed a mix of non-stop green screen/CGI action, no less than 4 be-headings (the first of which I thought to be quite graphic and gratuitous), and campy jokes that pleased the under-10's in the audience while leaving everyone else reeling. Entire subplots not in The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, or any of Tolkien's other works were added which turned the originally-thoughtful and modestly-paced adventure into a continuous stream of battles and CGI effects that left the actors scrambling for coherence and the plot careening off like Radagast's bunny-driven prairie sleigh (what the heck was that, by the way?).
The casting was generally weak, with an extremely-unfortunate choice for the voice of the Goblin King who sounded more like the village idiot in a Monty Python skit than any kind of intimidating monster. Bilbo's character had zero continuity with the masterful performance given us by Ian Holm. Seriously, shouldn't he at least have stumbled on the Ring like in the flashbacks from LoTR and the BOOK? He seemed to lose his accent, and with it the classic old-time British charm we've come to expect from hobbits, about 1/3 of the way through the film which was surprisingly upsetting. Not even Sir Ian McKellan could save this one, and in fact the "new" Gandalf seemed a nervous, twitchy, misguided rambler, far from the grace of our first introduction and which could not be explained by any amount of character development over a period of 60 years to Gandalf's 2000+ in Middle Earth. The portrayal of Radagast was near-embarrassing, I think coming completely out of the blue (or maybe out of the brown is more fitting) to any true fan of Tolkien fiction.
The movie had three major scenes which left me with a mostly-positive impression. First, the trolls Bill, William, and Tom were colorfully- unpolished but surprisingly (compared to the rest of the film) unobtrusive, though I would have preferred the scene follow closer to the sequence of the book. Second, the portrayal of the stone giants was creative, and in my mind, generally an artistic success. Third, the riddle scene with Gollum, although I would have been more satisfied with the suspense of Gollum paddling back to his island to discover his missing Precious as he did in the book.
Overall the movie was an extreme rush, which is maybe impressive considering that really not a whole lot of value was added to a 3-hour film covering the first third of a 3-hour book. I really hope that the script "grows up" a fair amount for the second installment, but I think I'll wait to buy my tickets until the day of; if only to take reviewers' advice to wait for DVD.