Not without its pleasures, but suffers from a sense of the stakes not being high enough and overall being somewhat lacking in the richness of the LOTR films - inevitable, I suppose, given the smaller canvas nature of The Hobbit
The stretching to three films might have been an attempt at giving it more grandeur as well as increasing its box office returns by 200 per cent but actually leaves it probably even more visibly thin ... would have been more satisfying, I suspect, if instead it had been a single film and pitched as a more straightforward adventure with resonances of the broader story that was to come than attempting out and out Epic in its own right.
(1, 2)
The stretching to three films might have been an attempt at giving it more grandeur as well as increasing its box office returns by 200 per cent but actually leaves it probably even more visibly thin ... would have been more satisfying, I suspect, if instead it had been a single film and pitched as a more straightforward adventure with resonances of the broader story that was to come than attempting out and out Epic in its own right.
(1, 2)
