Sigh

Rating: 4/10 (21 April 2015)

I'm gonna start off by saying that i loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy to death. When i heard Peter Jackson was returning with the hobbit i was excited to death. However i have now got nothing left but a bitter taste in my mouth.
First the good:
Martin Freeman is perfect as Bilbo. Simple as that. Perfect. Every scene he is in he raises the movies enjoyment level, even given the weak material he was given.
The entertainment factor of seeing thousands of orcs/dwarfs/elves fighting is undeniable. It may be cheap, but honestly it is one of the best parts of the movie (And that really says a lot when it doesn't even come close to LOTR)
And those are pretty much the only positive points i have.
Now the bad:
Horrible, horrible writing ruins all tension, and turns cheesy and laughable way way to often. It's not OK for this kind of movie to go into the same kind of comedy you could expect from an Adam Sandler movie. It's just not. Where the LOTR humor never felt like it broke the atmosphere and seriousness of everything, it's just insane how much it ruins any connection you have to the movie. And it's laughable when the movie takes itself so seriously and yet throws so cheap jokes in your face. It gives me a bad taste in my mouth.
CGI priorities the shiny above the believable. Why does everything look like it's had an instagram filter put over it? The color grading in LOTR was perfect, always changing to a new shade of color with every scene - and it always looked perfect. Here it just looks overexposed and cheap. And i know that since the hobbit is more of a children's book its supposed to be a little more colorful and cartoony or whatever - but honestly it looks horrible.
The plot here is beyond convenient. It's a combination of Peter Jackson doing everything he can to connect this movie to the LOTR trilogy, and stretching so few pages of the book to much film time. When a character is saved at the last minute, 10 times through the movie it just ends up being laughable. This script could seriously have been written by a twelve year old, and it would have been the same.
Spectacle > Logic. Legolas apparently has the ability to defy the laws of physics. Honestly i'm not gonna spoil what happens, but you'll know when you see it. I don't think i have ever laughed so hard at something that was supposed to be cool or bad ass.
No emotional connection to any characters at all. It just makes everything much worse when you can tell the movie wants you to get sad, but you just don't. BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO CONNECTION TO ANYONE.
SPOILER: Smaug dies 10 min in?!??!?! WTF, he was the BEST dragon to ever have been put on any screen EVER. He was the best part of the desolation of smaug, and cumberbatch was perfect as him. And then he just dies after a year of build up after the ending of the last movie.
All in all i don't think i have ever sighed so much in a movie before. It's just pathetic how badly this movie was handled.