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Hate it; for years, we've been trying to make video look more like film. Well, we're pretty much there, and now Cameron is trying to push digital back to look like video? Why? No idea, other than that Cameron secretly hates film and wants to destroy the medium. Note: I saw it at 24fps, and the image had a very prominent jutter, more so than any other big budget production I've ever seen and it has to be because of the shutter speed associated with shooting footage at twice the normal rate, then down-converting it to 24fps. Ugh.
ANYWAY!
I enjoyed The Hobbit quite a bit, especially once I started to get over the first ten minutes (which took me about a half hour). I HATED the stuff with Elijah Woods and Ian Holm... it felt so damned out of place! Why not just make it a straight prequel instead of hitting the audience over the head? Did we all REALLY need to be reminded that, Hey, Martin Freeman is playing the same character as Ian Holm? And it made no sense since... Bilbo had only just started writing There and Back Again the day of his eleventy-first birthday? The day he was planning on leaving and never coming back? And he was writing this for Frodo? Why? Seriously, why?! Peter Jackson is many great things, but subtle, he is NOT. If the movie had started with Martin Freeman sitting in front of his Hobbit hole, I swear, the movie would have been a full star better.
Other than that... loved the Dwarfs, though Thorin was trying WAY too hard to be Aragorn. And I like a lot of the Wizard stuff they added in. Not a huge fan of the albino orc being added, but I kind of want to read the story in The Unfinished Tales that supposedly mentions him, just to make sure... thing with Tolkien, was that he was constantly retconning, especially as far as the Hobbit is concerned. When he came up with the Hobbit, he had no idea Gollum's ring was going to be the Big McGuffin of the universe (at least, as I understand it, that was the case). But, oh, yeah! Gollum was FANTASTIC! Amazing CGI, and Andy Serkis delivered another fantastic performance. I agree whole-heartedly, one needs to see The Hobbit just for that one scene.
Also loved Bilbo's line to Gandalf--(paraphrasing, of course): "Are the other Wizards bad-asses, or are they more like you?" 
All in all, three stars, about the same as The Two Towers (more entertaining than that movie, but also more uneven).
