Definitely and improvement

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2014)

Definitely and improvement upon the first movie: we have a lot more beautiful wide shots with very decent VFX while the first one used to many close-up shots and had clearly cheaper effects to save on budget. While still lacking in depth compared to the book the story feels less compressed but the focus is on the main core characters and some side characters get neglected or eliminated. While I was reading the book I thought that some scenes might come of as very cliché in the film and they do, while in the book you get the characters thoughts which makes it all seems less shallow. Altogether I liked it but I just failed to connect with it: it does seems like a good screen translation of the book but still it feels like it's just not epic, not a classic. I never had a 'wow' moment or never felt blown away. I don't completely get the success of the series as there is nothing really special about it...