Peter Jackson channels George Lucas with his prequel trilogy

Rating: 5/10 (10 March 2015)

Committing almost exactly the same sins as George Lucas, Peter Jackson utterly fails with his prequel trilogy. Bad plotting, weak characters, dumb plot sequences, bad production design/art, and an ugly distracting CGI sheen. Spoilers be ahead...
The biggest problem is that The Hobbit is a children's book with character whimsy and plot lightness. Jackson misses that tone entirely and instead makes an inferior LoTR retread. This film needed to be charming and lovable with some swashbuckling and puzzle-solving. The book was impossible to put down when I read it at age 13. Darn. What a miss.
The second problem is that this is cinema bloatware. 9 hours of cinema from a 300 page book when LoTR was 9 hours from 1,500 pages of 3 books. And it even skipped entire sections and themes from the source material, inventing characters and jamming Legolas down our throats, looking creepy and far too blue-eyed. GREED, not love of Tolkien or the craft of movie-making, led Jackson down this path. Wasn't he rich enough?
The third problem is that this film is plotted strangely and poory planned from a screen writing perspective. Story arc is non-existent from movie to movie. The hero is the Hobbit, not the drawf. Smaug was a brilliant CG character, but was ultimately a sidetrack, not the main event. The troll scene in the first film was just awful. And the barrel sequence in the 2nd film was straight out of Nintendo. Attack of the Clones droid factory bad. The finale of the BotFA was a retread of the white city. Orcs go down far to easily. They are not menacing when 3 foot dwarfs and hobbits can slaughter them by the dozen. The ease with which orcs go down was eye-rolling. Except when the plot requires a double-bill boss fight at the end, then all the sudden orcs are tough.
The last problem plagues the film on a superficial level and is the icing on the cake. It looks like 9 hours of gooey HDR photography. Too much saturation, too much Adobe Lightroom luminance. Everything is too crisp and looks wrong. If you thought LotR was vivid, this is dripping syrup. It's a bad fantasy painting come to life. The creatures have realistic clothing/skin and have never looked more fake. There are new creatures and new looks for existing creatures that break canon with the first trilogy. Ugh. These films just don't look good.
What we have here is an utter failure. Phantom Menace quality stuff. I just don't understand how Jackson lost his mind and made these movies other than greed and arrogance. I suppose he was surrounded by sychophants while planning this project. No Jar Jar Binks level idea was shot down. At least we have the original trilogy.