I loved the LoTR trilogy movies so when I saw someone watching (what I presumed was) the second Hobbit film on a flight recently, I couldn't help but peek every so often. The visuals and action looked interesting, so now that I'm back on the ground I thought I'd give The Hobbit a shot. Within the first 10 minutes, I actually thought I must have been spying on the *first* Hobbit film in flight because the whole Smaug intro gave me deja vu... two hours later however, I realised I was wrong; I'd have to wait for the sequel to see all of the interesting things I'd seen over my fellow passenger's shoulder.

The Hobbit looked fantastic, contained decent acting, and a fairly safe script but it really was just a prologue to the next film. Having only seen and not heard the middle 45-60 minutes of Desolation of Smaug, I can still see why this first film was necessary but... as a standalone film, it's fairly unfulfilling. Even as I'm typing this, I'm thinking I could have just skipped the movie and had someone tell me the back story over a pint in 10 minutes so I could just move on to the next one. Movie, that is - not pint.

I've never read the books, so maybe this movie isn't really targeted at me. I hope the Tolkien fans enjoyed it at least. And I hope Martin Freeman wins the "Best Martin Freeman being Martin Freeman Performance" award at some point in the future. I really do.