I actually really liked “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012).  I’d give it an 8 out of 10.  And that’s even with my own admitted possible bias, as I am not a huge fan of traditional fantasy.  I certainly can’t claim to be a fan of the original books, because [downcast eyes], I’ve never read them. I tried “The Silmarillion” once, because I thought that was supposed to come first in J.R.R. Tolkien’s chronology … and I just couldn’t stay with it.  So I guess my take on this movie is that of an outsider, as it was with Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

But this was enjoyable movie for anyone, I thought.  It’s a total immersion into an incredibly beautifully rendered fantasy world.  I thought the sets and backgrounds were more detailed than the first films, for example.  It’s a gorgeous movie to look at.  The acting is uniformly excellent throughout.  And the continuity is just great; there are well crafted segues into subplots that will eventually lead to the original trilogy.

I think the only thing that hampered my enjoyment was that it felt so much like a children’s story.  (I believe I read once that Tolkien actually began his novel as a bedtime story for his children, while his subsequent “Rings” epic was intended for adult, mainstream readers.)

Peter Jackson had his creative sensibilities planted firmly in childhood fairy tale when constructing this movie.  For an outsider, this seems like a standard (and sometimes predictable) quest movie.  We have a tremendous deus ex machina at the end that a child might not recognize, but this adult did.

The dialogue, monsters and action were often too cartoonish for me.  As a fan of creature features, I found the monsters were often too silly to be credible.  (I had this small quibble, as well, with the original film trilogy.)  With the outstanding exceptions of the Warg and the White Orc, they often seemed like CGI-rendered cartoons.  The three trolls who want to cook the dwarves, for example, were like something out of a silly Hanna-Barbera cartoon.  If this film was supposed to engage adult viewers, this creative approach was a pretty big misfire.

But I recommend this, even to people who don’t typically enjoy sword-and-sorcery fantasies.

Seriously, though … that deus ex machina at the end … if such an option is available to our heroes, why not employ it from the start of the movie?  Hell, why not employ it throughout the entire “Rings” trilogy?