Big letdown after LOTR

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2012)

Having high expectations after LOTR, this movie really let me down for several reasons. Sections of it dragged very slowly, perhaps to fill time to make it last for three films. The action scenes were shown very quickly and disjointedly, probably to hide unbelievable special effects, it was like watching the SciFi channel at some points in the show. One scene looked obviously like a small model, this surprised me because of the high quality of the special effects in the previous movies, this seemed like a low budget release in comparison. Furthermore, I went to the 3D version, and because most of the film was quite dark to begin with, 3D glasses made it even darker. Perhaps those who saw the 48 frame/sec version had a far different viewing experience than I did, but the seemingly lower quality filming compared to LOTR made it much less enjoyable, and another disappointment for me was that this film supplies little reason to care about the characters, except for the ones you already knew.