I recommend it!

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2013)

So this is my first time writing a review on IMDb so I'm going to warn everyone that this may contain spoilers! I quite enjoyed the movie; The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings (hereafter LOTR) series has always been some of my favorite books. I do agree that the the time could be cut down, it doesn't really need to be three movies- it could have been just one. With the original LOTR trilogy, each movie matches up with one of the books, so it made sense for it to be three movies. The Hobbit is a shorter plot, there is no reason for it to be so long.
However, despite the length of the movie, I still enjoyed it. I thought that the cast of characters captured the written personalities quite well. As for the rowdy humor, it was supposed to be rowdy! For anyone who has read the actual book, the dwarfs are meant to be loud boisterous creatures. In this regard the film captured that aspect quite well. I have read through an amazing number of reviews that complain about the "lack of foreshadowing" the film held, but that is because the movie is a prequel to LOTR. Much of the information that shows up has been told in the sequel. The difference between more modern stories and older stories, is the modern ones lay everything out. The authors offer no challenge to the viewer/reader, and so if the information is not spelled out as if for a child, most dismiss it. Everything in the film held some sort of meaning, from the necromancer to the dragon, you only had to do some of the work yourself. If you are still confused after the movie, read the book. It probably would answer many of your questions.
Finally, I have also read reviews who claim that Tolkien STOLE his ideas from Rowling. This made me speechless. I still can't believe the ignorance of the people who support this claim. Don't be offended, I am going to explain why I've called these people ignorant. This is the reason, Rowling wrote Harry Potter AFTER LOTR and The Hobbit were written. His books were written before Rowljng even started to draft Harry Potter, so any similarities that you see (and there are several, I admit) Rowling would have borrowed from Tolkien. A dead man can't steal the living's ideas. He had been dead for 24 years when Harry Potter came out. If your not convinced, LOTR came out in 1954 and was written between 1937 and 1949, Rowling released Harry Potter in 1997. See? It is IMPOSSIBLE for Tolkien to have "stolen" Rowling's idea, she would have stolen his.
Besides Tolkien was named the "father of high fantasy" which should show that he had the original idea.