Not In the Tradition of Previous Middle Earth Adventures

Rating: 5/10 (14 August 2014)

I honestly can't see why everyone loves this film so much. It is nothing like the book, and though people are saying don't go into it expecting to see Tolkien's Hobbit, I at least expected to see something similar since this is credited as an adaptation of the original novel. What I got was a horrible bloated version of the Hobbit that barely resembles Tolkien's work. What's worse is the terribly cheesy love story edited in for a longer run time and more content and the often clichéd script. CGI is too frequently used (even the horses are computer generated). The giant super-soldier orcs are horribly obviously fake. What made the orcs from LOTR so awesome is that they were actual actors armed with a legion of prostetics. Here we get dwarfs mowing down monster orcs effortlessly, all while fleeing from elves in barrels flying down a river. Character's motives are unclear and instead of getting you involved with the characters, we get dwarfs whose names (unless you are dedicated to the book) you don't even remember chopping off Orc heads every thirty minutes like they are performing tricks. Plus the soundtrack is just boring. Anyways, it's a horribly made movie, made horribly just so they could squeeze three movies out of a 250 page book.