If you are a fan of Tolkien you will be disappointed

Rating: 1/10 (16 December 2013)

This movie is so far from the story found in the book that Peter Jackson wouldn't have needed to get the rights from the Tolkien estate. I disagree with many of the naysayers who think this shouldn't have been turned into a three part series. There is plenty of story, action, and character development in the book to make three reasonable length films. The issue with how Jackson has handled this "adaptation" is that they have truncated most of the important elements to the original story simply so they could make up drawn out action scenes for the sake of action.
The film immediately came off the rails in what should have been the queer lodgings chapter. I was fully expecting another fun scene like An Unexpected Party; where Gandalf lures Beorn into letting a company of Dwarfs stay in his house. What we get is a rushed scene where the entire company barrels their way into his barn-ish house fleeing from Beorn and locking him out of his own house. Then without explanation Beorn is fine with all the dwarfs piled in his house just because he hates orcs more then he hates dwarfs. This was one of my favorite scenes in the book and I was really disappointed with how awful it was done.
Next we get to the edge of Mirkwood where Gandalf seems to suddenly discover he needs to go to the south. In the book you get the impression that Gandalf with his great foresight planned to leave the party at the edge of the forest long before they got there. With Gandalf gone the rest of the company immediately become a bunch of morons who simply get lost in stupidity. The entirety of Mirkwood takes them less than 15min to traverse which really kills the feeling that it's a great and massive forest. There was no black river, not once did Bilbo say attercot to taunt the spiders while luring them away from the dwarfs. The Elves come in to save the day killing the spiders and then take the company of dwarfs to their prison cells. No twinkling lanterns, no fires in little glades that go poof when Bilbo or a dwarf tries to approach.
They are in and out of the Elvin prison in the blink of an eye with no sense of time that it took Bilbo to wander around learning his way around, scrounging for food and concocting his plan to escape. All of this was rushed through so we could have another action sequence of orcs chasing the party while elves chased them both but kinda helping the party of dwarfs. It makes no sense. Something that should have been done in a few cuts got extended to a 5min+ action sequence so they can show off their CGI.
I could go on, but I'll skip ahead to the last part that never happens in the book. The last 15 minutes of the film is a drawn out action sequence of the Dwarfs and Bilbo battling Smaug inside the Lonely Mountain. In the book the Dwarfs never engage Smaug at all. The long straight secret tunnel leading to the hidden door is not long or straight at all in the film. To top it all off, the ending was cut as Smaug is flying away toward Lake Town. There is no battle, no burning of the city, no Smaug getting shot in the breast by Bard and thus falling into the lake causing it to billow up in a cloud of steam.
In summary this is not The Hobbit. It is some film that Peter Jackson made up as he went along with what (conservatively) is less than 40% parts of the books story. If you are a fan of Tolkien you will undoubtedly be let down by this excuse of a movie.
-Patrick