They should have asked a Tolkien fan

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2012)

The Hobbit suffers from all the faults of LOTR but to a greater degree. Most seriously, the Garden Of Eden that Middle Earth should have been is instead a grey and barren place looking like it all turned into Mordor long ago; it's a land without beauty not worth fighting for and the remaining High Elves ought to depart for Valinor with all due haste. If Dracula ever needs a new abode he'd feel right at home in Rivendell and Moria consists of a series of fragile wooden platforms rather than tunnels lovingly hewn from the living rock over centuries by the Dwarfs.
The jerky action sequences are ludicrous. Jackson persists with having his characters miraculously survive while the world around them crumbles. The company live through their mountain path standing up to become a rock giant, rickety bridges disintegrating into splinters, and being thrown from the tops of tall trees as they are felled by the impact of wargs. I don't recall any of these happenings in the book itself. Why the screen writers felt the need to change the story in these and so many other places I'll never know. If they thought they could improve on the original author, they were very wrong.
If The Hobbit had been made by a Tolkien fan it would have been an infinitely better film. If you are a true Tolkien fan, stay well clear. I'll leave the final word to Christopher Tolkien, who says it far better than I ever could:
"Hollywood has turned Tolkien into a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time. The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away."