A Joyless Journey with Tolkein Points Scattered About

Rating: 3/10 (29 June 2014)

I was hoping to be surprised with #2 after the oddities that strayed from the charming, effective story by the great linguist and teacher, Tolkein. Instead, previously admired movie director, Peter Jackson, and his creative assembly, have gone where no group has gone before. Part 2 of this needless trilogy is a joyless slog through made up characters which serve a non-story purpose and contain so much lengthy violence including stabbings and decapitations that it really buries the idea of the original story of Tolkein's The Hobbit.
The encounter with the spiders was just wrong. The clever language of spiders, and indeed most animals is suppressed, but the the language of Smaug is not. The encounter with the Wood Elves was odd in that they weren't approached by famished dwarfs desperately looking for food. The escape in the barrels was over a Class 5 rapids that could not possibly be used for commerce. Melted gold? So quickly ... so much ... and since we know dwarfs and hobbits are temperature sensitive, well ... what's the point? To make Smaug mad enough to attack the village? The village didn't throw the mysterious solid-then-molten gold on him, but that's where his anger is focused.
Overall, it's not fun. The characters have no really happy moments. Gandalf makes strange decisions, none of them with a wink or twinkle of his eye, Radegast makes another appearance, and all of it is so serious and depressing that you may not want to finish the movie. I did, but just barely.
There is no need to put more "Tauriel" and Orlando Bloom's Legolas in the story. Although I love Bloom's Legolas, that was a different story. It takes away from the already limited time of the main character, uh Bilbo. The great man/bear Bjorn was well done and as scary as he needed to be. For my money, the extra orcs and wargs and the oddly provocative Pale Orc who appears more than Bilbo are a complete waste and change the narrative so that it becomes confused and completely inaccessible for children. By the way, the target audience for The Hobbit is children. Peter and Phillipa decided it was more important to make a trilogy with lots of action, violence, and ideas they gleaned from other sources, including their own imaginations, than to translate the best Hobbit ever made for the screen. Too bad.
I really don't know what to expect for Part 3. Perhaps 15 armies and nuclear annihilation?