I haven't read any of the previous posts yet, but having watched the Desolation of Smaug yesterday I would like to give my two cents on it without being influenced by the earlier posts (which I am curious to read however)
There may be spoilers in my post so anyone who would like to avoid any shouldn't read on.
Generally I found the movie to be okay without either totally carrying me away or turning out a disappointment. I had expected for a lot of new stuff to be added to the plot due to the frequently mentioned issue of turning the book (comparatively short compared to the lord of the rings) into a movie trilogy.
What did surprise me (and I must say it did so in a negative way) was not so much that there was a lot of stuff added but more how much they either left out or rushed through at an extremely fast pace.
For example it took me by total surprise how much they rushed Beorn. The book includes a number of elements which would have been easy to include in the movie and which would have given Beorn a lot more character. In the book Gandalf tricks Beorn into accepting 13 dwarfes as guests by at first not revealing there were any dwarfes at all. Instead Gandalf starts to tell the story of how he and Bilbo got there and in the process gradually revealing the group by group the presence of the dwarfes whom Gandalfs signals to show up by whistling whenever Beorn deducts from the story he is being told that more individuals must have been there than Gandalf had so far revealed. Not only would this part have been a fine chance to give a short summary of events so far, but it would have also been another chance to reintroduce the dwarfes one by one. Even with the visible effort of the makers to make the dwarfes individuals I would still be unable to give the correct who is who to every single one of them. The book further includes the notion of how Beorn's image of the dwarfes improves after he finds out (while ranging in bear shape at night) that the story Gandalf told was true. Furthermore the book includes the strict request of Beorn to send the ponies he borrows the dwarfes back once they reach the edge of Mirkwood. In the book there is a short debate between Gandalf and Thorin who considers taking the ponies along (and Gandalf points out that they are being observed by Beorn in bearshape all along to ensure that they live up to their word to send the ponies back). I have a very stong feeling that (with the actual sending back of the ponies included in the movie) there will be such scenes in an extended DvD edition. Without these scenes it seems a bit like something is missing (especially given the efforts to show the dark sides of Thorin's character in other scenes).
The scene with the spiders in the wood was also extremely rushed compared to the book. I find the added (as in not being part of the book) scene in which Bilbo notices the uncommon rage the ring is causing in him after he slaughtered the spider a sensible addition, but it doesn't really make up for all that was left out about the spider scene from the book.
Furthermore they leave out all about the starving dwarfes trying to get to a feast of the elves they notice from a distance in the wood. In the book the elves disappear the moment the dwarfes come up and the perception of the elves that the dwarfes are "disturbers of peace" and that they left the road (in the movie their loss of the road is never mentioned again) are important reasons in the book why the generally good elves arrest the dwarfes.
In the movie the elves act a bit more like douches by comparison. I do see why they bring in Tauriel (I don't think the book ever actually alludes to the mere existence of women at all), but the way they did appears a little too clishee for my taste. Also her saving Killi with Athelas after he had been wounded by an arrow with a morgul head (why the heck would they happen to use such extremely rare blades as arrowheads?) was just a bit too much "copying" from the fellowship of the rings. The elve (Legolas in particular) fighting scenes with the orcs were too much over the top for me. Don't get me wrong now; the scenes as such are awesome, but they just don't seem to fit into a fantasy epost that is meant to be taken serious. We have seen some of it in the lord of the rings trilogy already, but I had the impression that the makers were under pressure to top the "Oliphant scene" from the return of the king when working on the Legolas scenes of the Hobbit. The result I'm afraid is a mixture of extremely skilled ballet and genocide committed on orcs that would fit well into an itchy and scratchy cartoon or a super hero movie that is explicitely meant for the heroes to be over the top. For the film adaptation of Tolkien's books I think it would be good if they toned it down a little.
One negative consequence of this treatment of the orcs is that it is hard to take them serious. They are ugly but don't come across as particularly dangerous. They are slaughtered by the dozens while one never gets any actual sense of danger for the heroes. With the way they come across it seems like a horrible shock that after a fight with one orc Legolas actually gets a nosebleed (after being treated in a fashion that one should expect to scratch even an elve a little more).
Even the heroes themselves don't seem to take the orcs or the evil particularly serious. Gandalf for example enters Dol Guldur all by himself in full awareness of the fact that it is a trap and a strong incling that the necromancer is Sauron (wasn't Sauron in the lord of the rings someone who was... you know... intimidating people?).
When the orcs enter laketown (how did they ever get there without being spotted?) they don't seem to bother anyone enough to strike an alarm so all the (noisy and therefore impossible to go unnoticed) fighting that takes place seems to be regarded as a private brawl that is nobody else's business.
I like the fact that they elaborated on the poverty of the town ruled by a selfish mayor (something alluded to in the book), but while they elaborated on it they still left many important questions unanswered.
Smaug looked just plain awesome and is certainly one of the big bonus points of the movie. His hort comes almost close to what managers get as compensation these days when they are getting fired for running a business down. It is for that reason that I very much regret that even with Smaug they cut down the content of the book in favor of their own additions. In the book we have a much longer exchange of Bilbo and Smaug while Bilbo still wears the ring. They instead focus a lot more on extremely spectacular action scenes. Same as with the elves vs. orc scenes they are excellently done but make Smaug appear much less dangerous for his apparent inability to hurt even a single dwarf in spite of all his awesomeness. I also wish that they stopped the bad habbit to pretend that fire and heat only hurt if you are standing right in it. You don't need to stand in a flame to burn to death and if you (like Thorin) ever decide to do some rafting in a tin barrow on a river of liquid gold you are going to be toast while Thorin didn't even sweat.
I haven't said everything I could on the movie and admittedly I stressed the points of criticism in this review. In spite of all that I generally like the movie and don't regret having seen it in cinema. There are just some points which to me seem so obviously problematic that I wonder if these points were discussed among the makers of the movie and were deliberately accepted.
