Disappointing Overall

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2014)

This review is actually for all three movies. First, though I want to say that I'm not generally a person who expects films to be exactly like the books, because I know that good filmmakers need to make choices about how they are going to relay the story, and sometimes things need to be changed due to the different nature of film vs books. Having said that, I found the whole thing disappointing overall, for several reasons. Many of them have already been enumerated by previous reviewers, so I'm just going to go over the most egregious problems I had with the films.
1. MOST IMPORTANT: There should have been only two films. The book wasn't even 300 pages, so there was no reason to spread it over three films. I can understand why they didn't want to do only one, but two would have been plenty. If they'd tightened up most of the battle sequences, eliminated a couple that were completely extraneous to the plot, and dumped a couple of pointless characters, that would have cut the film down to two right there.
2. Having said that, given that there were three films, why is it that there was really any characterization for only four of the dwarfs (Thorin, Balin, Fili, Kili)? I have the same problem regarding Beorn. First, they jazz up the meeting of the group with Beorn, turning it into them running from him like he's going to eat them when he's in the form of a bear, then they don't even spend any time with him afterward. Annoying.
3. The love story between Kili and Tauriel. Why? Having Kili die defending Tauriel totally takes away from the story - he should have been fighting with Thorin to the end, like he was in the book.
4. The ridiculous Orc-as-main character. Pointless. I think we saw more of him than we saw of Bilbo in the last film, which is unforgivable. I'm going to add Alfrid to this, because why was he even necessary? There was enough drama in the film already. They should have killed him off when they killed off the Master of Lake-Town. He served no purpose except to suck up screen time from other, more important characters, like Bilbo and the dwarfs.
5. The drawn-out battles, especially in the previous two films, with endings that didn't even make sense in the world of the film (every one of the dwarfs and Bilbo should have been dead long before they reached the Lonely Mountain). And why change the way some of them happened? The escape from the Orcs in the first film, the change of the troll scene (hilarious in the book - why not keep it that way?), and the escape from Thranduil's prison, which ends up being a fight against Orcs, were all great scenes in the book already.
6. Radagast's character assassination. I actually am fine with him being in the movie, but they made him out to be a total joke, which he is not.
7. The lack of wrap-up in terms of Thorin's funeral, what happened to the treasure, the people of Lake-Town, etc. If I hadn't read the book, and only saw the movie, I'd be thinking, "What happened?"
8. Riding goats, Thranduil's elk, Radagast's rabbit team, etc. WTF? Also, too much CGI in general.
What I did like: 1. I thought the acting overall was great, and that Martin Freeman made a terrific Bilbo. I just wish I had seen more of him, especially in the last film. Same with the dwarfs. Richard Armitage gave Thorin the proper level of gravitas, and Ken Stott and Aidan Turner did the best they could with the limited amount of lines they had. I think the actors who played the other dwarfs, especially James Nesbitt, were wasted. They should have had far more to do than they did. Lee Pace was appropriately "elvish," and Benedict Cumberbatch was perfectly creepy as both Smaug and Sauron.
2. I actually did not have a problem with Tauriel as a character, and I understand why they added her. If they did not, there would have been no female main characters at all. I just had a big issue with the time wasted on the romance between her and Kili. Couldn't they have just had her be a great fighter and leave it at that? Us ladies don't always need a romance to keep us interested.
3. I actually liked that they incorporated some of the LOTR appendix stuff, Gandalf's explanation in "Fellowship" of what happened to him when he went to Dol Guldur, and Legolas as a character. Those events took place during the time of "The Hobbit," so I thought it was legit to show them. Otherwise we would have Gandalf just disappearing for parts of the movie without an explanation of where he went, which would have made no sense at all.
4. Smaug looked great, as did Lake-Town, the kingdom under the mountain, Dale, and Thranduil's hall in Mirkwood. Jackson got the atmosphere right, which is what I would expect.
5. Bilbo's return to Bag End was pretty much exactly how it was in the book, as was the scene where he finds the Ring. If more of the films could have been like those two scenes I would have been ecstatic.
I'm not sorry I saw the films, I don't think they were a waste of time, but I was disappointed in them.