Visually splendid, though lacking continuity

Rating: 5/10 (9 December 2014)

It's one of those much discussed topics amongst the lovers of saga cinema, does The Hobbit live up to the splendor and magic of Frodo and his 10 odd cinema hours of Lord of the Rings adventures....After seeing this installment, I have to say with hand on heart, no. Using the formula of, New Zealand backdrop, Elves, Humans, Goblins and Auks, with a couple of LOTR characters thrown into the mix, but yet lacking a positive direction. It seemed to me that there were a whole pile of different scenarios and they were just thrown together to make this presentation. I spotted a couple toward the end, first was that people in Lake Town got the impression that the smaug was coming to destroy the town and kill them all, one of the main characters still had a black arrow that could be used as the only weapon to kill the beast, and then we see the Smaug arguing with Bilbo at the end and says he is going to destroy the town, then we don't see any of this, it should've happened. thus the ending of the film for me was a let down. One thing that is this movies saving grace is the visual splendor, the CGI pro quality that just shines all the way, loved that! Another thing I was not to impressed with was some of the battle scenes, particularly the one with the dwarfs and elves going down the river with the barrels, was just to fast and too much going on, and many action scenes were just that bit too fantastical. Many other critics of this movie have said that it is only about 30% faithful to the original book, but then what film is these days? Enjoyable romp of a film, but does leave itself a bit wide open to continuity and story line errors.