What I liked about The Hobbit:The Howard Shore score was once again excellent. It establishes a new theme song for the dwarves and uses it in dwarf-centric scenes. For example, there's an upbeat variation when the dwarves are all fighting together. And much of the old music is back as well. The ring theme plays in a foreboding moment when the ring is first used.
And the New Zealand landscapes are once again a sight to behold, and they are used very well.
What I didn't like about The Hobbit:
Before seeing the movie, I noticed a lot of people defending the choice to stretch it out into three movies because "there's just so much content." If that's true, then why isn't The Lord of the Rings 9 movies? Or 18 movies, seeing as it's actually 6 books and one book apparently contains 3 movies worth of content? Surely The Lord of the Rings was done a great disservice by squishing it into a pitiful 12 hours of screen time, right? And yet, people who say The Hobbit should be 3 movies seem perfectly happy with only 3 movies for Lord of the Rings. It seems these people are terribly bad at math or have a short memory span or lack the fundamental ability to make mental connections between two different things.
I predicted that the movie would be needlessly elongated and I was right. New conflicts and characters were introduced to pad the story. Is this a bad thing? Well at least the new characters are drawn from the established lore of Middle Earth rather than being invented completely.
I'm a huge fan of Peter Jackson but he's certainly not without fault. One of his flaws is that he's pretty sloppy when it comes to continuity. An awful lot of time is spent on closeups so that you can't get a good view of the surroundings and you can't tell if things have been moved around or removed or added or changed. Of course this isn't a huge deal but it gets pretty ridiculous when every single character's horse magically disappears like before the final battle in Return of the King.
There seems to be a heavier reliance on CG characters in The Hobbit than there was in Lord of the Rings (which admittedly revolutionized CG characters with Gollum). I wish there were more cool prosthetics in The Hobbit. We get to see cool CG characters in plenty of movies.
The Lord of the Rings obviously deserved to be a trilogy. It was grander in scale and the stakes were higher than The Hobbit. I thought that The Hobbit should be one movie before I saw it and I still think so afterwards. Let's see if I can design such a movie, sticking with the 170 minute run-time. 20 minutes in The Shire + 10 minutes with the trolls + 10 minutes in Rivendell + 15 minutes in The Misty Mountains + 15 minutes with Bilbo and Gollum + 10 minutes with Beorn + 20 minutes in Mirkwood + 15 minutes in Laketown + 25 minutes at the Lonely Mountain + 10 minutes for the final battle + 5 minutes of epilogue + 15 minutes of credits = 170 minutes. Yes, it's not as drawn out as we all would like but neither is Lord of the Rings. And it can be drawn out more in an extended version. I wish I could say that Jackson is making a legitimate artistic choice by drawing it out like this but it seems to me to be chiefly a way to milk the franchise for money.
