Nice visual, nice characters, terribly done.

Rating: 5/10 (18 December 2013)

MAJOR SPOILERS: I loved The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I loved it because, despite straying from the story some, it captured all the characters and the most important scenes perfectly. This changed a LOT though in the next one.
Of course, we have the same great actors that everyone loves, but watching the movie makes you wonder if Peter Jackson read the book at all. Absolutely none of what happened in this movie was like the book. Now I liked how they added the elves, but making them show up everywhere and constantly saving the day was ridiculous. Also, they added in a big story with Bard helping the dwarfs, which I wouldn't have minded if they done this part terribly. Gandalf's battle with the Necromancer and the Orcs would've been good if it wasn't so slow and drawn out, and it made it worse that they stuck these scenes in the middle of Bilbo in the Dragon's cave, which made you just waiting for Gandalf to be done.
Now I don't know about the rest of you, but I thought Fili and Kili were the best dwarfs, and then Jackson went and took them out of the whole second part of the movie! They stayed in Laketown while everyone else went to battle the dragon. There was also a romance triangle between Legolas, Tauriel, and . . . Kili.
OK, I'm done ranting about what they added in. Now for a short part where I rant about what they didn't.
I think I can speak for all hobbit fans when I say that, aside from Bilbo's convo with Gollum (riddles in the dark), Bilbo's convo with the dragons and the spiders were probably the best parts of the book. And they took BOTH of these parts out! I spent a lot of the movie anticipating Bilbo's encounter with Smaug, and they botched it. The only thing they seemed interested in was having the dragon fly around blasting fire and knocking over the pillars, and also making him look stupid while trying to catch the dwarfs and the hobbit. OK, I'm not gonna pretend the dragon didn't look cool. But looks is about all he had. He was slow, clumsy, and not at all clever like in the book.
ONE LAST COMPLAINT: Does anyone agree that Beorn's scene in the book was possibly the funniest? Well it didn't happen. All they did is made him look like a scary jerk, and again they were more interested in making this looking like an action scene rather than the funny, witty scene it was supposed to be.
The only reason I gave this movie any stars was because 1. I love the characters, and 2. The movie had great visuals. No matter how bad they did the spider scene, it still looked cool, and no matter how bad a character Smaug was, the treasure room was gorgeous. Thanks for reading.