A fairly decent movie, but not The Hobbit you may have read...

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2012)

I will do my best to keep this review short, like the story Tolkien created, NOT like Peter Jackson is doing by making this into a trilogy.
I will start by telling you that all the special effects and CGI magic works well for visualizing an adventure story. The settings, the costumes, the filming, yes it all works well and looks marvelous! For that reason alone, and the wonderful soundtrack, Hollywood will love this movie. But... I came to the theater to see The Hobbit, and this is not how I remember the book to be. This is a drawn-out, over done attempt to milk the viewers for 6 plus hours and a lot of money, for a story that can easily be told in 2.5 hours.
The Hobbit is a very simple story, if you bother to read the book. It tells about a brave little creature teaming up with a band of hard-nosed dwarfs, who head out to fight a dragon.
Peter Jackson has taken way too many liberties with the film by adding elements which were not a part of the book, and by dragging everything to the extreme just to lengthen his movie(s). He is trying to make this into another LOTR, which was not Tolkien's intention, and why Tolkien wrote The Hobbit first - THEN went on to write LOTR. A prime example of this is the first 40 minutes of the movie, which was covered in the book by just a dozen pages! Go see the movie to whet your appetite for some spectacular scenery and action sequences, but please do not think that these characters and the storyline were as they appeared in the book. I urge you to read the story if you haven't already, so you can understand how the focus was on a timid little character who managed to survive perilous situations. It seems that Jackson is more intent on making EVERYONE a hero, a fighting master, a focal point and portraying them ALL as main elements to the story.