Expectations dashed.

Rating: 3/10 (5 January 2014)

I'm not a professional reviewer but a devoted Tolkien fan. I don't mind taking liberties in telling a story but to discard most of the book and then add a senseless love interest between an elven character not even in the book and one of the dwarfs is a travesty. I did enjoy Jackson adding some history to LOTR but not enough to make three movies. I gave the movie three stars as the action was fun if a little far fetched but this is fantasy. I had high expectations after LOTR but Jackson writes his own stories and leaves out much of the story I loved. The road through Mirkwood was supposedly a major road from the past, not some winding trail. There was no feeling of the amount of time that was passing. Mirkwood is over 200 miles wide and should take weeks to cross, not hours. I was really looking forward to Bilbo taunting the spiders only to be disappointed. The stay in the woodland elves prison was for many days not a few hours. And to make Bard a barge man and not the captain of the guard makes no sense. This seems more an effort to sell tickets than tell a story.