Quite disappointed

Rating: 5/10 (27 December 2013)

Of all the Peter Jackson films, this was the one that strayed furthest from the book and in doing so, lost practically all the charm and magic of the bits I was looking forward to. Perhaps a quarter of the movie was loosely (very loosely) based on the book, the rest was unnecessarily formulaic pap (especially with the music that played each time The Ring was shown). The interaction with Beorn was reduced to about three minutes, the order of how they got lost in the woods and trapped by the spiders was changed around completely so that more fighting scenes could be put in, the dwarfs were not packed into the barrels but instead the tops were left off so that they could have yet another highly unlikely fighting scene (in real life they would have been flooded with the first waterfall) which, of course, was not in the book. The secret door was no longer a secret with a great big staircase in the form of a stone statue leading up to it, the door did not open with a piercing last sunbeam but with the light of the moon like the door of Moria. The dwarfs were not wimps hanging out by the door but engaged in full battle with Smaug in direct contradiction to anything that happened in the book. Orcs were given too much prominence. And totally unnecessary and boring love plots were introduced.
All that said, it wasn't a terrible film but in changing it so much to apparently make it more exciting, they lost most of the charm of the book. I don't think Peter Jackson's heart was in this one. I should have waited for the DVD and that says it all really.