I went and say this on opening day in IMAX 3D (non-HFR). I had a few worries about the movie, my main one being that it would be drawn out since they decided to do three movies on this one tiny book. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by just how good the movie was. A lot of additional information was displayed from other books such as Radagast the Brown and a few other things that weren't in The Hobbit, though they were still loyal to the lore.

The movie did start off a little slow (as does the book) but it soon picked up the pace once they finally started their traveling towards Dale. For those of you wondering, the movie ends after they finished crossing the Mistry Mountains and Bilbo escapes from Gollum with the ring. I'm interested in how they fill the last two movies though as they now only must cross Mirkwood before reaching Dale.

By the way, Andy Serkis did a fantastic job as Gollum. I know the character is technically CGI, but he does all the movement in a suit covered in motion detector thingys and he of course does a great job voicing the character. I honestly thought Gollum was some of the best scenes in the entire movie.

Del Toro is great, but I was happy to see Peter Jackson take control. He did a great job with the LoTR trilogy and he was the perfect person to bring another Tolkien book to life.

I'm not a LOTR nerd by any stretch of the imagination (just saw the movies; never read the book of this or the trilogy) and I absolutely loved The Hobbit. It was long, but it was thoroughly entertaining throughout the entire thing.

I'll second Serkis' performance too. Gollum was awesome, as always.

Well see my whole thing starts with, I'm not really into fantasy (like medieval style fantasy) but it goes much farther than that.

I read the Hobbit when I was like 15 and LotR not long after that, at the time I was pretty fond of them, but that was a folly of youth. In the time since then I've read a lot of books, much of it literature and I came to realize that The Hobbit and LotR really can't hold a candle to the works of Steinbeck, Hemingway, Orwell, etc. One thing I will say about Tolkein is he had a great grasp of the English language and he was a fine writer, I just personally find his work to lack in many areas.

Medieval Fantasy is just not my thing I guess.

I don't think that's strange, everyone doesn't like fantasy.

Well see, FFs tend to be steampunk or sci-fi usually, steampunk is far from medieval fantasy, as you have some technology like airships and dreadnaughts and whatnot. For what it's worth my favorite FFs are the more modern ones anyway (aside for VI which is the most steampunk of all of them).

Now there's a guy I haven't seen in awhile.

You have been seen! Lol, I check in pretty regularly, it is my site after all!

Perhaps you're not the astral I knew on MSN Groups? If that's the case, nice to meet you new astral!