I enjoyed it. But ill admit some elements got on my nerves.
A certain line by the Goblin King
annoyed me to no end...I just couldn't justify it's inclusion. Also the rabbit sled.....once again I wasn't sure, but it wasn't quite as bad as I had feared.
I understood why they did the troll scene the way they did and in fact the decision to put a bit of a fight in wasn't such a bad idea. I was a bit irritated by them changing how the trolls were delayed in cooking the dwarfs but....I suppose it worked in terms of the development of the Bilbo-Thorin love tension.
Also I disliked the overuse of CGI, which is such a cliche gripe, but applicable here. Why was Azog ENTIRELY CGI based exactly? He looked like an undercooked gingerbread man with scars on.
I also found that scene where he and Thorin finally have their face-off to be very cringe-worthy. Not to mention the music at that scene.....it just tries too hard. But this might have more to do with me struggling to get into the mood of the film this time round.
The 'Riddles In The Dark' scene was superb.
So overall: mixed feelings. I could go into much more detail on the changes to the story and dialogue, but since I actually understand and somewhat agree with why they did what they did, it wouldn't be much of a criticism.
After all you go from a story with almost too much detail, to one that is almost devoid of it and you will have to embellish a bit.
I'm extremely interested in how they will handle Smaug. In Tolkein's world dragons are highly intelligent creatures who don't really ally to anyone. They are a bit 'voice of Saruman' as well in their ability to mislead and employ double-speak. Not to mention hypnotise people, although this last point is somewhat questionable given that Tolkein's idea of magic is....quite subtle and he rarely directly mentions the term or even gives much description of spells apart from a few Gandalf employs.
But more importantly I am interested to see how they physically present him on screen....a shed-load of CGI would perhaps be a bit much for me, but a mixture could work. So far they have alluded to him well and handled it in a nicely mysterious way.