The novel The Hobbit is a delightful little story. It is relatively brief (well at least as brief for Tolkien standards) and does not seek to waste the reader’s time with fluff. The money-hungry decision to take that charming little story and pad it out with nonsense to three very long movies is a predictable, yet still sad decision which lead to each movie feeling drawn-out, vapid, and ironically incomplete (at the if the first of the trilogy is any indication).

It seems the way they planned on extending the story out to a trilogy was through making each scene as long as possible, far longer than the substance of the scene requires. As a result, I often found myself zoning out a bit thinking “why are we still here?”, as I thought though what is happening on the screen. Sure, the scenery is fantastic, but we did not need as many zoomed out walking scenes as we got. The battle scenes especially feel a bit long in the tooth and seem to celebrate special effects more than plot or character development. The battles are feel especially toothless knowing everyone is going to make it through to the end. Perhaps the only scene that really feels impactful is the meeting Gollum and the riddle battle, where the length of the scene felt proportional to the impact to the story.

I have mixed feelings on the songs. On the one hand, it felt much more fun hearing them sung versus just words on a page. It helps that they are mostly accompanied but some fun hijinks. On the other hand, they are just as jarring in the movie as they are in the book. They often feel like an abrupt tonal shift that feels jarring. I find myself feeling shocked after a three hour movie that we are only a third of the way through this story, and I can only hope to be surprised if they figure out how to make the next two feel less empty.