Yeah, I have to say that I was disappointed overall. Some of it was great - Smaug was incredible, and he alone made the price of admission worth it, but I was just...I dunno. Not cranky or angry the way I was with Abrams-Trek...just...disappointed.
The whole Tauriel/Kili thing is making me squirm. I really hope they don't go down the path I think they're going, because it would, in my opinion, undermine the Legolas/Gimli bromance. They were the basis of the rapprochement for the Elves and Dwarves.
And speaking of Legolas...whew. Look, I love Legolas. He's awesome, and he's easily my favourite Elf ever - but putting him into The Hobbit is like George Lucas continually throwing in Chewbacca/Boba Fett/C-3PO/etc in the prequels. If he'd just been in the sequence when the Dwarves escape captivity, yeah, I could have handled that. But it seemed that from that point on a substantial portion of the movie - especially the action sequences - were centred around a character that was never in the source material.
I feel like Jackson's done a heel-face-turn from LotR. Then, he took extraneous characters (such as Tom Bombadil) and removed them, or rolled walk-on/walk-off characters (like Glorfindel) and condensed them into other characters that were already present.
So, for example, rather than have Glorfindel appear from nowhere, rescue the Hobbits, and then vanish, the role was condensed with Arwen's character. I liked that, and thought it made literary (cinematic?) sense.
But for The Hobbit, Jackson seems to have gone the other way. Now he's not only greatly expanding the roles of those "cameo" characters (like Radagast), but he's creating new characters from scratch and giving them major plotlines (like Tauriel).
I'm just going to have to see how it goes, I guess. My biggest disappointment is the emotional impact of LotR just isn't there for me. In the first ten minutes of "Fellowship", I literally had to fight back tears of joy when I saw Hobbiton. I turned to my wife and told her it was like Jackson had reached into my mind, pulled out how I'd always imagined it, and put in on the screen. The entirety of the LotR is my absolute, no-questions, favourite film of all time.
And "The Hobbit" is...you know. Okay. But with the walk-on/walk-off characters, the adding of all manner of extraneous storylines and the padding out of "real" storylines - and the apparent abandonment of a lot of real sets for green-screen CGI - I'm feeling a Star Wars Prequel vibe more than an epic "Lord of the Rings" feel.
Seriously...if Kili tells Tauriel he hates sand I'm just going to punch Peter Jackson in the throat!
When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead. It is difficult only for others.
It's the same when you are stupid...