The Hobbit (2012 - 2014)

A New Zealand American fantasy written by Guillermo del Toro and directed by Peter Jackson.
In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. He goes on an adventure with a wizard and 13 dwarves to reclaim a dwarven kingdom from a dragon.
If this had a different title, I would have liked it more because this story was NOT The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I won't go into my standard stuff about how microphones in Rivendell were being used to record whispering at Lonely Mountain, but I will try to communicate what I liked and disliked about these films. Obviously, the starting point for this is that they were about as accurate as a blind man playing darts. Given this fact, most of what I liked was when said blind man hit the bullseye by accident. The Bilbo meets Gollum scene was pretty accurate, down to the individual riddles. There were only 2 mistakes in the wording and Gollum's acting was top notch. He was just as expressive as I came to expect from the Lord of the Rings series. The battle of 5 armies (talking about the war, not the film as a whole) was pretty cool. There were lots of creative weapons, riding animals and orc/troll monsters. I have to say, it's 1 of the 2 battle scenes that I have liked from the whole LOTR set. The other is Legolas and Gimli fighting the oliphants in Return of the King. Smaug looked alright, but was nothing special. Now this blind dart player analogy goes further. He's got his 3 darts and they are good. It's all he needs, but dude starts pulling ninja stars and blowguns out of his pockets. Why are Legolas, Saruman, Galadriel, Radagast, Azog, etc... all in this? What are these extra plots doing here? Why is Tauriel running on walls like the Prince of Persia or Trinity from The Matrix? My point is that what started out as a classic story that any director would give body parts to have his name on a film of turned into this giant monstrosity that was clearly all there just to make money. It was about 90% rewrites and additions, with 10% of the original left so the name could be capitalized on. Apparently, Tolkien's writing is not good enough for Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson. I think my point is clear. I rate this adequate. It would have gotten a better rating with a different title.