Horrid, Horrider, Horridest

Rating: 2/10 (3 January 2014)

While I do love Tolkien, I am not a purist; I understand that what works in a book will not necessarily work in a movie, so I recognize that movies based on books will not simply be readings of said books. That being said, this movie is an abomination, bearing only a passing resemblance to Tolkien.
Peter Jackson made two mistakes: The first,in releasing LOTR first, he became at least philosophically attached to the darker themes of the later work and appears to be unable to back away from it in deference to Tolkien's intent in his first work--to entertain children. The second is in attempting to take a single, short, children's book and trying to make it into an epic trilogy a la LOTR. It cannot be done, reasonably, but in making the first trilogy he perhaps became addicted to his own press as the maker of miraculous trilogies and thus everything he does must be a trilogy.
To make this short book into an epic trilogy and maintain the dark tones, he all but throws the book out the window and leaves us with a heavy, leaden, useless succession of overwrought battle scenes which appear intended to impress the audience with the effects creators' skill, but in no way advances the characters or the story. Bilbo's character development is completely fallen by the wayside. Whatever happened to the humor of the spider scene in the book with an invisible Bilbo running around insulting the spiders in Scottish? Instead we have a series of mini-Shelobs getting stabbed and torn apart. The depiction of Beorn is also less than satisfying; no evidence is seen of his remarkable menagerie--he simply has a few beasts and oversized honeybees.
And once again, the higher projection speed is distracting at best and sickening (quite literally, for anyone prone to migraines or motion sickness) at worst.
If you must see this, save yourself the price of admission and wait till it comes out at Redbox. That's what I'll be doing with the next one.