Not half what it could have been .

Rating: 7/10 (27 December 2012)

I just saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and it was very disappointing. When I heard they were going to make 2(3) movies out of a very short book I expected them to use a lot of the backstory from The Appendices, The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
Instead they completely rewrite the history of Middle-Earth, weaken Gandalf in order to build up Radagast and to compress 500 years into 5 days and basically give us a huge amount of filler they made up for the movie when the original story would have been more interesting and more engaging if properly expanded instead of being completely rewritten.
Its a good movie, but its far short of the standards of the LOTR films, which at least stayed true to the spirit of the books. If it had stayed more true to the source material it would have been at least twice the movie it actually is.
The Hobbit is full of plot holes, missing explanations and bland filler.
The extremely high frame rate makes everyone seem fat-faced in close-ups, although the 3D effect is impressively floating.
And Glamdring still doesn't glow around orcs, and nor does Orcrist; despite Gandalf saying all elf blades do and the goblin king actually mentioning Glamdring is supposed to shine like daylight.
And Gandalf still summons the eagles through freaking Moths! That was a dumb idea from the beginning, sigh.
Its just a disappointing movie.