Tolkien is turning in his grave

Rating: 2/10 (13 December 2013)

Admittedly, I am biased from having read the wonderful book, but it looks like Peter Jackson has been writing his own story. He keeps making up pointless crap as an excuse to add more CGI and more fighting scenes. If you are looking for mindless fighting, zero dialogue, an overuse of CGI that would leave James Cameron shaking his head in disbelief, then sure, this movie is probably for you! However, if you are looking for the same emotion and magic that the book brings out in you, prepare to be disappointed, over and over again.
Beorn is in the movie for about a minute and has the eloquence of a donkey with autism. Mirkwood before the elves appear is barely five minutes long. Which means the spiders disappear before they even got the chance to appear, and there is no Bombur falling in the water, and nothing to lure them off the path, they just get lost because they are extremely dumb dwarfs. Orcs are chasing them wherever they go, and the barrel- ride out of Mirkwood is a 20-minute long scene where nothing really happens, except a lot of orcs die, and Kili gets shot with a poisonous arrow(?). Then they bribe Bard into smuggling them past the guards into Lake-town. Apparently Bards ancestor shot off a piece of dragon scale under his left wing, so Bard already knows of the Dragon's weakness. No thrush has to tell him anything... All the dwarfs race into Smaug's lair and go on a rat-race in which Smaug is too brainless to actually kill anyone, and when he has an absolutely obvious shot at it, he suddenly has a change of heart and decides to let them live. Also, four of the dwarfs are still in Lake-town tending to the poisoned Kili and fighting orcs with the elves. Make sense? Not really, no. The book has been torched, and Peter Jackson has rewritten it the way it was (probably) intended; as a fighter-book with cool environments, cool people who say cool things, cool dwarven caves and cool statues. The things I have pointen out are only a few of the many changes and disappointments from the movie. Who needs a good story with all this CGI?
The acting is dreadful, the dialogue is dreadful, the CGI is dreadfully overused, the plot is dreadful (it's not the same as the book, believe me.) But the dragon was pretty cool. So therefore: 2/10.