It has to be pointed out that the source material isn't as interesting as LotR.

What complete and utter bullshit.

The only bullshit in this thread is the one you make up, Bradley.

You can just about feel the hair on your feet growing longer.... For all their Wagnerian bombast, the LOTR films proceeded at a clip, with lots of story to tell and spirited new characters lurking around every bend. There was exuberance in the filmmaking, too, as if Jackson—who cut his teeth on some of the most outlandish, low-budget splatterfests of the 1980s and '90s—still couldn't quite believe he'd been allowed to make these movies. They were generous entertainments that you didn't have to be a Tolkien convert to enjoy—they made one out of you. The Hobbit, by contrast, feels distinctly like a members-only affair. It's self-conscious monument art, but is the monument to Tolkien or to Jackson himself?

Even once Bilbo and company take to the hobbit highway, the pacing is leisurely verging on lethargic...

Instead of feeling like we've been transported to Middle-Earth, it's as if we've dropped in on Jackson's New Zealand set, trapped in an endless "making of" documentary, waiting for the real movie to start.

For the record, I returned to see The Hobbit a second time, at 24 frames, and found it more aesthetically pleasing but no more dramatically engaging.

I like Bradford but his shtick is predictable

I'll never lower myself to that hypocritical nonsense.

A good time to end a scene is when the slowest viewer says, “I get it”; but Jackson, so determined to deploy all his CGI resources, often can’t let go.

Shooting at 48fps — is... disorienting in the more static interior scenes, where the scenery upstages the characters. In the Smaug battle, I thought I was watching a video game: pellucid pictures of indistinct creatures.

Charming, spectacular, technically audacious… in short, everything you expect from a Peter Jackson movie. A feeling of familiarity does take hold in places, but this is an epically entertaining first course.

A feeling of familiarity does take hold in places...

The work of the sombre Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, whose grinding tale of apocalyptic poverty The Turin Horse ran to a mere 155 minutes, feels nippy by comparison.

This film is so stuffed with extraneous faff and flummery that it often barely feels like Tolkien at all – more a dire, fan-written internet tribute.

As a lover of cinema, Jackson’s film bored me rigid; as a lover of Tolkien, it broke my heart.

This was what I was worried about -- taking a novel that's maybe 1/5 of the size of LOTR and making a movie just as long as LOTR.

Please carry on.

I have always made it known that I never read reviews before I have seen a movie and written my own review. I strive towards a purity in viewing each film, and this often also extends to avoiding any advance promotional materials when possible.

I realize this is counter to the majority of KJer's who enjoy the whole process of film production and marketing from start to finish. The danger with that is how easy it is to succumb to the hype surrounding films rather than experiencing the film as a standalone piece of art.

How nice it would be to weigh in on Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit without having to lament its newfangled double-speed 3-D 48-frames-per-second projection rate, which must be seen to be disbelieved. The immediacy of the ­actors is startling, but the background is weirdly foreshortened, the fakeness of the sets and makeup an endless distraction. Staginess does nothing for a ­fantasy-film epic. The dislocation caused me to miss great gobs of exposition in the first half-hour, which is all exposition, the grandeur of the Lord of the Rings trilogy having been replaced by something that resembles tatty summer-stock theater.

The Hobbit probably plays better at the normal frame rate, but how much better? Hard to say. Signs of bloat are everywhere. The relatively breezy Rings prelude—one book—doesn’t need to be stretched out to three long installments: The fractious team of dwarves looking to regain their homeland after many years of exile could have traveled the Great East Road, fought the requisite orcs and dragons, and still had time for a song or two in one movie. Martin Freeman as the young hobbit Bilbo mugs his way through the first half (the invasion of his home by dwarves and Ian McKellen’s Gandalf is like the Marx Brothers stateroom sequence stretched out to an hour), but he wins you over in the one stupendous scene: a potentially lethal contest of riddles with Gollum, once again embodied by Andy Serkis plus CGI. Gollum is more chilling this time, his Uriah Heep obsequiousness yet to come, a violent flesh-eating psychopath with voices in his head telling him to kill.

The duel with Gollum, set in a cave, is like a one-act play, and makes me think this technology would work for, say, filmed theater and opera, where the uncanny presence of the performers would be something to treasure and the artificiality wouldn’t matter. Meanwhile, we have the prospect of two more Hobbit pictures, which are sure to be less exciting than discussions of pixel resolution, scan lines, and refresh rates.