Even though this film is over a decade old, with the CGI looking a bit dated and the colors being quite garish at times, I still thought it still looked incredible.

Having read the book recently, I’m a bit torn on the differences. I do like that some of Gandalf’s escapades are shown, which are only hinted at in the book, but I’m not sure I like the Azog arc. My guess is that Azog (instead of his Son, Bolg) will fight in the battle at the end of the story and that the film makers wanted to build him up over the first two films. We shall see…

I also was taken aback by the hostility of the dwarves towards elves in/around Rivendell. There was none of that in the book, quite the opposite. Even though the book is exclusively told from Bilbo’s perspective and especially this section focuses mostly on him, I don’t remember even a hint of trouble.

The section with the goblins in the misty mountains I found rather cartoonish, mostly the behavior of the goblin king and the fight when the dwarves escape. The Hobbit is a children’s book, sure, but that whole section felt a bit out of place.

On a slightly sentimental note, I have become quite partial to the dwarves’ song from the beginning of the story. When reading the book, I searched out renditions of it and sung along. Given the runtime of the three films, I was quite disappointed that it was cut so very short in this film. As written in the book, their song has 10 verses, which are described as being a mere fragment of the whole. The film rendition on the other hand only has 2.

When the credits rolled, I had hoped for a moment that here would come the full version, but it was a completely different (inferior, in my opinion) song to the same tune.