Rating: ***
Making three movies out of The Lord of the Rings made sense. It was split into three books when originally published, the whole thing is well over 1,000 pages long, and even considering all that there were still characters and story developments in the books that director Peter Jackson jettisoned from the film trilogy. By comparison, this new trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's first Middle Earth book, The Hobbit, seems to be squeezing out every last detail for the movies, and it's nearly so excrutiating you have to wonder just how much padding did Jackson and Co. sew in that a 350-page novel needs three, two-and-a-half hour movies?
