A PERFECT movie interpretation of a wonderful tale

Rating: 10/10 (24 December 2012)

Initially a little crestfallen and rather sceptical after reading the numerous negative reviews, I left the theatre wanting to immediately have another viewing of this amazing film.
If you have read the books and enjoy the lore and world Tolkien has so meticulously crafted, I personally guarantee that you WILL love this film.
The casting and acting of the main characters were all but perfect, the visuals stunning and the music captures the emotions perfectly as it did in the LOTR films.
The film generally sticks very closely to the book(s) save a few additions and changes which barely detract from the experience.
The only argument that I might ever agree with against this film was that the dwarfs, save a few of them, saw too little character development and there was little to remember them by. However, this problem was also in the novel and you could hardly blame the film for this. I can also understand the worries about the 48FPS although I am personally alright with it.
None of the "additions" into the film were lore-breaking - in fact, almost all of them came directly from the appendices from the text itself.
Going through the numerous negative reviews, I have to say that most of the criticisms are hardly valid, the most confounding and stupid ones going in the lines of these:
*SPOILER ALERT (MAYBE)*
"The references to Sauron/The Necromancer were shameless advertisements of PJ's earlier films"
WHAT?! WHAT?! Seriously?! This comment was made by a mainstream critic and I am not even going to elaborate why this is frankly one of the stupidest statement made in journalism history.
"The violence in the film goes against everything Tolkien stood for"
.........???
Some of the comments about the runtime were cogent, but many were unfounded and simply rubbish. Critics and haters alike jump onto this bandwagon and the argument will always revolve around PJ artificially stretching out the runtime to put the films in a trilogy.
However it is hard to agree with these comments when you have comments like these: "The film milks every detail of the text", "And the scene with gollum just went on and on with so many riddles." which hardly make any sense.
I'd like to point out that the Hobbit film was about the same in length as a LOTR film, and the LOTR films had serious omissions, one of which being about a quarter of the first book. (where Frodo and friends were making to Bree through the Old Forest) While I agree that the Hobbit was a very short book relative to the LOTR books, the runtime gives PJ a great opportunity to add onto the film using additional material (that is entirely CANON) from Tolkien, and I hardly see how that is detrimental to the film.
In overall it is clear that the extremely negative reviews stem from unfounded criticisms from haters who are hardly able to justify and/or elaborate on their views. If you enjoy Tolkien's material, you WILL love this film. I can assure you this much.