To put it simply, no. I liked the LOTR movies personally, but The Hobbit, while not terrible, is simply way too overblown and bloated for it's own good. I mean, jesus, it was supposed to be an adaptation of a 320-something page kids book. It's so artificially inflated with stuff from the Tolkien canon, massive over-use of special effects, and desperately trying to re-visit highpoints from the LOTR films that it just never gels together right. I haven't seen the third one yet, but everything people have been telling me is just disappointing as fuck as a lifelong fan of the book.
I think Peter Jackson made some pretty severe mistakes in these movies.

They're mostly filler, and you can almost instantly tell when you've hit a filler scene because it just feels wrong and forced. They really screw up the pacing, too.

The tone is really off, as well. At times they're trying to capture the meant-to-be-read-to-children feel of the book, with all the songs and adventure, and at other times they're trying to emulate the heavy mood of the LotR films. And they never quite get either right.

The trailer for An Unexpected Journey is excellent, though; just watch that and stop there. Maybe also go look up the scenes where Bilbo talks to Gollum or Smaug, as that's all anyone paid to see anyway.

Yeah I've said it before, but The Hobbit was my first assigned book report book, so I hold it very dearly but couldn't stay awake through the first or second one. And furthermore kids who watch the movies first before reading the book will have the opposite reaction to movies (like LotR and Jurassic Park, etc. for me) and potentially lose interest in reading it, like instead of "they forgot to put it in the movie" it's "it was in the movie but not in the book."

Well, minor spoilers here:


As I understand it, Smaug basically bites it in, like, 10 minutes of the new movie. Which means it's another 2 hours and 40 whatever minutes of JUST the five armies plot which is fucking ridiculous.

Smaug dies literally before the title credit for Battle of the Five Armies comes up on screen. The rest of it is an interminable CGI battle featuring characters we don't care about like the sexy dwarf and all the fucking elves.

Martin Freeman's Bilbo, by far the best part of these movies, is in about ten scenes where he actually speaks out of an almost three hour movie. That is a sign you've really lost your way. The whole thing is just terrible.

The only thing that even remotely amused me was Dain the dwarf general telling the elves to sod off and other Scottish insults whilst riding a giant obese boar.

The fucking Rankin and Bass animated movie tells the story perfectly fine in ninety minutes. An argument might have been made for two movies. Maybe. 9+ hours of bullshit is just inexcusable.

What's up with the CGI anyway? I guess there's that thing they say about hindsight or whatever (like how Jurassic Park or the Matrix looked so cool but now you can kind of tell) but I honestly thought the LotRs (and even some recent stuff you might just see on shows like Battlestar Galactica) looked better than what I saw in the second one, before I fell asleep anyway..

The reason why the Hobbit looks worse than LOTR is that in LOTR they used way more physical locations and much better sets. Hobbit is suffering from Star Wars prequel syndrome is building 10% of a set and then making the rest green screen.

And, for record, where the Hobbit movies started losing me was in the second one where the dwarves, for no reason, have to "sneak" into Laketown, which literally makes no sense whatsoever. In the book, the people of Laketown are totally welcoming to the dwarves, friendly, and believe that the arrival of the dwarves will basically mean they're coming back and things will be all better so they are welcomed with open arms. In the movie, it is never coherently explained why they have to sneak into the town when, upon arrival and being discovered, they are welcomed in the exact same way they are in the book.
I understand you have to play with some of the plot elements to get a movie to work, but this was the most bullshit way possible of introducing Bard, who is a much smaller character in the book. This, for me, was the quasi-George Lucas moment of the storytelling starting to circle the drain in favor of sacrificing Tolkien's writing for Jackson's ideas. Then the 30 minute keystone cops vs. Smaug chase was just the red flag that, oh yeah, they are just padding this shit out so we can have huge CGI battles later on in the next movie.

It's just weird. Like, they're not all bad ideas, but why not just make your own new thing if you have such ideas? It seems like every Star Wars novel or fanfic combined into a weird CGI stew but in Middle Earth's universe. LotR is pretty much Campbellian at this point (maybe it is, I never actually read Joseph Campbell and dooubt if "Campbellian" is a real word either) and Tolkien's archetypes have been pretty much every video game I played growing up. And while Lucasfilms might have gotten a cellphone company in trouble for using "Droid" without permission, I never heard of Tolkien's family suing Blizzard for "Orc," etc. It's just never seemed as big of an overall franchise as a movie like Star Wars or Star Trek, and I think it would've been better if it was just "Peter Jackson Presents: ORIGINAL MOVIE WITH FAMILIAR CHARACTERS AND THEMATIC ELEMENTS. FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY" I dunno.

And at the end when Elrond tells Legolas to go seek out Aragorn. Bilbo was about 50 in The Hobbit, and 111 in LoTR...so Aragorn would have to be at least 61 when he meets Frodo???

Well, to be fair, Aragorn is a Numenorian (something which was not really discussed in the theatrical LOTR cut), so he has a life span of something like 200 years.

Dude, The Hobbit was like fifty pages long and written for young children. They needed to make three movies out of that, so give them a break; of course they're going to pad it out with all sorts of cool bullshit.

The pig-riding Scotsman was pretty awesome, yes.

That review is spot on in a lot of ways, though weirdly obsessive about some things. The elves were the best part of Tolkien, and they're fucking horrible in the movies. Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner is indeed a good way toward how they should have been portrayed.

Every single opinion I've heard on this page is just baffling and terrible.

Also fond of the Filthy Critic:

http://www.filthycritic.com/

Holy shit, I forgot about Filthy. I remember reading that he wrote the "liver bones" joke on the Simpsons.

^reply to kingarthur.