I'll get straight to the point: if you loved Peter Jackson's
Lord of the Rings films, you'll love
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. If you didn't like the former, you won't like the latter -- because, above all else, Jackson has crafted this new film to be an exact stylistic match to the trilogy in dialogue, design, music, pacing, tone and even the gore-level.
In other words, Jackson has taken J.R.R. Tolkien's charming, amazing children's novel prelude to his later epic Rings saga and -- much as he did with the trilogy films -- turned it into a huge, sprawling action movie full of visual wonderment. Rather than skew the film towards the younger audience the book was written for, Jackson has made a movie for older fans of the Rings films.
Personally, I loved the heck out of this movie -- all nearly-three-hours of it. Is it perfect? No. Does it seem a bit padded-out to make it merely the first third of a new trilogy? A bit. Is it full of enough magic, heart, great acting and jaw-dropping spectacle to make it worth seeing? Absolutely -- unless, as mentioned above -- you didn't like
The Lord of the Rings.
