6/10 for the movie, 10/10 for the trilogy

Rating: 8/10 (17 December 2014)

Remember those days when everyone claimed that the LotR trilogy isn't three separate movies but one movie split into three? It might have been true about the original trilogy, but it could not have been truer about the Hobbit.
The LotR trilogy, while being shot and produced simultaneously, was actually sourced from three different books which had their own arcs and conclusions to make each part stand out on its own. In terms of movies; each movie had drama, character development and action you would care about. This was an impossible feat with the Hobbit trilogy considering the sparseness/mood of the source material. The result? After the first movies you'll see legions of people decrying it for lack of action until the final few moments. After the third, it's vice versa. For fans of Peter Jackson's vision of Middle-earth, this is in fact great news.
See, if you take BoFA as a standalone movie it does have its flaws - - some pretty serious. If you take the Hobbit trilogy as a chance to relive *that* Middle-earth, you'll get exactly the movie experience that you could have hoped for after LotR. For those fans, I'd recommend watching the first two movies like, in the 6 hours preceding the third one's showtime. All the drama, character development from the first two will start resonating with the action found in the final part.
Not only the LotR trilogy was a masterpiece, each part of it was a great film on its own. The Hobbit trilogy, on the other hand, is *one* great movie for fans of Peter Jackson's Cinematic Universe split into three disjointed ones. The trilogy gets 10/10 for what I wanted from it, the movie gets 6.