My sister estimates that if Thorin cut down on his staring-meaningfully-into-the-distance time, this movie could have come in under 2 hours.

I could have lived with all the fight scenes being cut by 2/3, and we would have lost nothing in either plot or characterization.

Did anyone else get the sense that Thorin is being explicitly positioned as this movie's Boromir?

Also, there will be a hella lot of sad fangirls at the end of the last movie, IJS.

I had lots of niggly issues, like Bilbo being the first one to attack the Orcs after Thorin gets beat down, and being successful at it. And the conversation about the Witch-King of Angmar ignoring the prophecy about how he would die--the point is that he never died, and was never buried.

But I loved the Riddles scene, and thought the choice to play Gollum as split personality worked really well.

In general, it was entertaining, but I thought it was too close in tone and narrative technique to the earlier trilogy. Some bits seemed pretty repetitive, like the bridges and cliffs tilting and falling so people could cross a chasm. That's a pretty damn specific thing to use over again--twice, no less!

Well you know, that's just how chasms work in Middle-Earth!

Heh, Jessica. I though gravity and momentum were remarkably kind in this movie, as well.

I really, really agree with your next-to-last point. I think that was the most brilliant bit of inspiration they had. Although I also liked the drawing out of the home/belonging and lack of same theme. Although, a few of Gandalf's speeches clearly wanted to be taken from Tolkein, but there wasn't anything to pull, so they wrote it instead and didn't quite hit the mark

I'm not sure how I feel about the decision to create a specific enemy. It reminds me of that one uruk in the original trilogy.

Debetesse, yes. In the original novel, of course, they have a sequence of enemies, but I can see why they did it, even if it seems forced.

I believe this is relevant to all our interests.

[I did consider posting in Natter instead, but it seems not quite appropriate right now.]

AV Club asks about one of the most jarring scenes:

Simple question here: When Azog gets Thorin down and Bilbo comes to his rescue, what exactly are all the other dwarfs doing? (At least, the ones who aren’t dangling from a branch, about to fall to their deaths.) These are a group of honor-driven, exceedingly proud individuals who think of themselves as loyal-to-the-death warriors and are constantly out to prove it… and they just stand meekly by while a hobbit saves their leader? There’s some awfully unlikely stuff in Unexpected Journey, starting with 13 banging, oblivious loudmouths sneaking out of Bilbo’s house without waking him in the morning, and ending with that exceedingly videogame-y goblin-caves scene, which looks like it would have killed all involved 50 times over if they weren’t so obviously CGI constructs. But the moment where everybody just stands around with their dwarven-mailed thumbs up their dwarven-mailed asses while Bilbo saves the day is reaching too hard for uplift at the expense of logic.

Also, there will be a hella lot of sad fangirls at the end of the last movie, IJS.

True this.

I agree with just about all of that except the sneaking out of the house bit. There were definitely some characterization bits for me that didn't work, and how Bilbo chooses to go on the trip to begin with is one of them.

I thought Martin Freeman did a really excellent job, though.

Word, David.

I know why that scene was done that way, but it didn't do any justice to either Bilbo, the sneak-around-and-be-silent guy, or the honor-bound violent warrior guys.

Later in the book, when Bilbo does become violent, he still kills the spiders only when he's wearing the ring. Full frontal violence is very much NOT his thing, and it really bothered me to see that.

Yeah, and it's an important character point. In the book, the way the dwarves gradually gain respect for Bilbo is initially through him bumbling around. And you lose a good bit of that by making him be all determined warrior at this point.