Well, first of all am a huge fan of Tolkien and i've been reading his work for years, so maybe i was expecting too much.
The prime purpose of a movie is to entertain and this one did it in a few scenes ... the rest is pure waste of money.
There are so many things wrong about direction like:
- the giants worms, i mean c'mon, if they have worms to make giant caves on earth, why not attacking the mountain from within??
- Legolas jumping on falling bricks looked like Luigi Bros on Nintendo games
- the Tauriel-Kili romance was really necessary?? Fili and Kili death scenes were really lame. They should've died defending Thorin like in the books and have a great funeral. In the books Thorin is buried with the Arkenstone and his sword, the wealth is distributed as promised and Dale is rebuilt, while Bilbo get back to the Shire really rich.
- Thorin and Dwalin see that almost 100 orcs came to fight them ... why not, let's fight ... next scene, fight is over and no bodies nor blood anywhere
- Thorin end up fighting alone in the end while Dwalin was ... ?
- an entire army of orcs from Gundabad got destroyed by 10 eagles and Beorn?
There have been great movies this year: Inception, Guardians of the galaxy, Edge of tomorrow, The imitation game, The equalizer ... this movie won't have it easy competing among these. Maybe they should an special nomination for the "most amount of wasted CGI".
Am sorry Peter Jackson, you have disappointed me.