Terrible

Rating: 5/10 (12 December 2013)

Overlong, pretentious and boring. Peter Jackson has met his Waterloo with this film.
It simply lacks the genuine excitement, emotion and depth that the LOTR films had. Even the first Hobbit film was exciting and emotional, beautiful in its own way. This movie is artificial, it strives to be epic but ends up being boring and even comic at times. The audience laughed when it was over and I'm sure that wasn't meant to be so. Right?
The script is a stretched out mess. It could have been half as long and twice better. The source material simply doesn't provide enough plot for the kind of extravaganza that Peter Jackson and his team are attempting. The film has three plot lines, only one of which was featured in the book. The other two are an invention of Jackson and his writers and you can tell. They simply fail to come to life. All they do is recycle elements from the original LOTR trilogy.
I can only hope that the third one will be better. What else is left to do...
5/10