The worst film of Peter Jackson's Middle Earth franchise

Rating: 5/10 (26 August 2014)

For some unknown reason, I denied to watch the Lord of the Rings films for years, even though I was at the right age when they were released (which was, adolescence). I decided to watch them only last year, over 10 years later, and fell in love with how a blockbuster fantasy film series can tell so much about the real world in such a great gift wrap (that is, the visuals).
So I sat to watch the two Hobbit films this year - more accurately, yesterday, back to back. The first Hobbit film was okay, but something felt wrong. This second film came to make clear to me which parts are wrong.
First of all, the themes of pride and the fight for it are so obviously presented - nothing like the LOTR films, where its themes were well hidden and you actually had to think a bit in order to find the underlying messages. This alone makes those two films shallow, let alone the simultaneously endless and meaningless Orc-fighting scenes which are there only to showcase the CGI technology.
And this brings us to the second point, which is... the CGI. The original LOTR films had an organic feel, a big part of which being that all main beast characters were real people in greatly-done makeup and the backdrops actually were photographed real-life miniatures (this in particular is what I mostly loved about the visuals of those films). All these have been replaced by CGI - and not even the most "filmic" one. I have to exclude the Smaug dragon (which is exceptionally animated and rendered), but everything else feels too video-game-like. To make things worse, I noticed some terrible mistakes in lighting the actors for green screen.
Third, the camera work. Peter Jackson had a discreet yet distinctive style of capturing the images of the LOTR films. The first Hobbit film was close to that, but this second film is photographed in the terrible Avatar-like way (which is, always move the camera around so that the 3D feel comes out bolder).
These are only some of the cons I got from the film. Nevertheless, as someone already said on the discussion, the film is too expensive to be terrible. It's a film you can watch as a LOTR fan or just for time killing, but it has nothing of the magic the previous films possess.