Saw this opening night...

Thought the storyline was done fairly well (although no need to draw it out over 3 movies...) but my god - the camera drove me batshit absolutely f*cking nuts.

Constant pans from close up to close up rather than just having a still camera zoomed out where you could just see the whole scene unfold. Completely distracting and annoying as hell, served no purpose other than to show off the fancy FPS.

The CGI was brutal IMO. So much of it and it looked so blatantly fake. Oh, and a HUGE step back from the LOTR movies where they put so much focus on detail, used real actors for almost everything, etc.

The battles scenes... one of the amazing things about the LOTR movies were the epic large scale battle scenes. In The Hobbit it just constantly zooms into a one-on-one battle, shows someone getting killed, then pans across the whole battle to show another one-on-one while never really showing a zoomed out angle that displays the mayhem of the battle.

I didn't hate it. But I found the camera work annoying beyond description and compared to the LOTR series it was pretty brutal. As a stand alone film it was decent were it not for the style of filming.