Remember Remember the 19th of December.  DiF'ers, Hobbits, with sort of a plot.

Trying to organize my thoughts... I'm not good at this having opinions thing...

But dear lord, so many groans and facepalms. Most of the dwarves were the worst kind of stereotypical fantasy comic relief, each one more of a cartoon than the last. Which is even more glaring when you put them next to the few dwarves who had no prosthetic noses, no silly hairstyles, etc.

And Radagast. His existence within the movie? Totally fine, sure, go for it. His being another fucking cartoon? The rabbit sled? The birdshit on his face? HELL NO MOVIE WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME???

Also, long fight sequences, too much cg, etc etc

I wanted to like you move, I really did, but there are some things I just can't forgive.

P.S. I'm bad at posting, and bad at having opinions on movies, but I just got home from the theater and needed to air my thoughts, jumbled as they may be.

Here's the question: Was the 70's cartoon more serious than this version?

I saw, according to my ticket 'HFR3D The Hob' (pronounced 'heifered'?). On the up side it didn't give me a headache like 3D usually does. Huzzah. Also I didn't hate the HFR as long as I told myself 'Pretend it's a live play' once every 20 minutes or so. I imagine that I could eventually get used to it. So while I would be happy to never see a 3D or HFR movie again, if I have to see a 3D movie I would honestly probably rather see HFR3D.

That said, it made the makeup look like makeup (especially old Bilbo), and most of the swords looked prop-ish. Basically real things looked real and fake things looked fake. And when it's a fantasy movie...that's not a good thing. Also when they either time ramped things faster or slower than IRL it looked very unconvincing. However, I would love to see, say, the Cirque movie in HFR3D.

The movie itself was uneven and very Peter Jackson. Big problem with stakes when your main cast is clearly invincible. I liked the white council and riddles in the dark parts best, and had to remind myself that all the Gandalf-ex-machina and cheesy parts (except Radagast) were pretty much directly from the book. I don't know what was up with Radagast, but I think they were trying to make up for removing Tom Bombadil? I don't remember him being quite that silly in the Silmarillion.

Yep, I'm going to snap at that bait - the book doesn't need fixing. The problems of the movie have little to nothing to do with the book, i.e., the beats of the story, but stem rather from a) the addition of numerous, highly improbable action scenes which stretch our suspension of disbelief, b) the replacement of nearly all enemies with unconvincing CGI and the resulting weightless of most of the fighting, and c) the padding out of the story with 'appendices' shit we really don't need to see (principally the Necromancer subplot and the White Council) which halt the pace almost as badly as the forced Arwen scenes in LOTR.

It's a shame though that they ultimately fail to capitalise on these spectacular and overly elaborate set pieces by not demonstrating and distinguishing the dwarven characters. Instead, they end up just being superficial crowd-pleasing events. There was one moment where Kili reacts to the possibility of having lost Fili (or maybe it's the other way around), but I was surprised by how little was done to make the dwarves interact with each other or show their character (other than, you know have Bombur do X because he's fat or Dwalin do Y because he's the fierce warrior) during the action scenes.

Mainly though, and this may age me, this film's action needs to slow down and stop having so much in the frame.

Another question (spoilers):

Why do both Thorin and Gandalf agree that the Rivendell elves will try to stop the quest (and so they must lie about it e.g. academic interest only) and then when Elrond finds out, he's not that bothered.

Why does Balin attempt to stop Thorin handing the map to Elrond, and then as soon as the runes are deciphered he blurts out the actual mission objective  right in front of Elrond?