"I'm Surrounded by Dwarfs!!!"

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2013)

The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey is Peter Jackson's answer to J.R.R Tolkien "The Hobbit". "The Hobbit" was written before the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and has already been adapted into many cartoons and animation features. The Hobbit is, visually, an extremely rewarding experience; I can say that the opinions of the 48fps (frames per second) are not completely true. You can tell a difference between this and regular fps speeds in the beginning, but it is a minor distraction and remains so for only a little while. The screen ensemble gave a good performance, not great, but good while Andy Serkis gave an absolutely stunning motion capture performance for Gollum. His 5-10 minute scene was by far the best and most entertaining in the entire movie; which is amazing considering the big special effects scenes scattered throughout this move.
My main quibble with this movie was the pacing and the dwarfs. This movie was almost three hours long and only covered a third of novel that was shorter than any of the LOTR novels. The reason for this is quite obvious, $$$$$!! This movie will make hundreds of millions of dollars, as will the other two Peter Jackson is currently making. The consequence of this for audiences is that the movie drags out for a prolonged amount of time, especially in the first act. My second problem was the dwarfs, there was Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Biflur, Bofor, Bombur, Fili, Kili, Oin, Glion, Nori, Dori, Ori...shall continue? There are just TOO many characters thrown at us in this movie and the only one we can connect with is Gollum, only because most of us have already seen him in the previous LOTR trilogy.
Although the ending was at a weird spot, the pacing was slow, and there were too many characters, this is a fairly satisfying popcorn flick that would be enjoyed by those who fell in love with the LOTR won't be disappointed, but they may not be overly-entertained.