Big fan....now here are some issues I had....

Rating: 7/10 (16 December 2013)

These are my observations after having seen the film, and yes, they do contain spoilers. Read at your own discretion. I'm a huge fan of LOTR, and really loved the first Hobbit film last year. That being said, here are some issues I had with this second film. And let me state at the top: I fully understand that this is Jackson's film based on Tolkien's work and is not meant to be a literal translation from the text.
Firstly, some characters, specifically Gandalf and Legolas, are venturing into superhero status in this film, and it is not a good thing. Clearly they both survive this trilogy and make it into LOTR, so their survival is never in question, but neither character in this movie displays any sense of fear or vulnerability. Remember that great scene in Return of the King where Gandalf basically prepares Pippin for death? Or how about that scene in The Two Towers where Legolas loses his faith and laments that the men and boys defending Helms Deep are too young and too old, and that they'll never win? We can feel for these characters because we would certainly be afraid if placed in the same situation. It was character development at its finest. In this film, however, any sense of this empathy was absent. Like I said, we know that Gandalf and Legolas survive these movies going in, but it almost seems like they know it too, if that makes sense, and their actions in this film verge on reckless.
Secondly, and this piggybacks on my first statement about vulnerability: We're 2/3 of the way into a trilogy involving more than a dozen good guys on a journey, not to mention a good bit of secondary good-guy characters, and all are being hunted by packs of brutal orcs, wargs, spiders, goblins, trolls and a vile fire-breathing dragon. Yet, no one dies. How are we, as the audience, supposed to understand what is at stake or what the odds are, if no good guy dies? Not a single one. This also robs the bad guys of any credibility. You can make the meanest, most disfigured, gruesome-looking baddies an audience has ever seen, but if they continually fail at accomplishing anything whatsoever, it's difficult to view them as anything more than minor bumps in the road. (Also, how many times did Smaug refrain from incinerating Bilbo and the dwarfs during the climactic scene? There were a few times where he could have hit them with a loogey and instead just decided it best to snarl at them.)
My third issue with this film is the blatant recycling of LOTR plot devices and even camera shots. In this film, we get a brand new female elf. In both movies she is beautiful and falls in love with a member of another species in an act of forbidden love. In both movies there is a scene where she uses herbs to heal a character who has been stabbed and there is an angelic shot of her doing so with a white background and pretty singing. Also, both movies have the exact same plot device surrounding the human hero having to live with something his ancestor did in the past. With Aragorn, his ancestor refused to destroy the one ring when he had the chance. With Bard, his ancestor was unable to kill Smaug when he had the chance. It's almost as if the writers forgot that we just saw the LOTR movies a decade ago, and decided to reuse plot points they liked and thought worked. I'm open to feedback. Obviously, you're free to disagree with me, but I had trouble getting past a lot of these issues.