[Lalaith]

There does - or am I imagining it? - seem to be a much greater level of agreement about this film than there was about the LotR films.
I saw it today - in full 3D HFR IMAX glory. I squealed when Gandalf threw the fiery pine cone. Overall I liked it, more than I expected to given my reservations about PJ turning it into a trilogy. I liked the things most of you liked, and disliked the things most of you disliked. (Too damn long, suffering from King Kong-itis)

What I would like to gripe about however is - given how much back story they stuck in, could they not have remained more true to the real back story? The Quest for Erebor was always one of my favourite things in Tolkien. This part I could quote almost verbatim:
" Weeping, Nár fled down the Silverlode; but he looked back once and saw that Orcs had come from the gate and were hacking up the body and flinging the pieces to the black crows.
Such was the tale that Nár brought back to Thráin; and when he had wept and torn his beard he fell silent. Seven days he sat and said no word. Then he stood up and said: “This cannot be borne!” That was the beginning of the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs, which was long and deadly, and fought for the most part in deep places beneath the earth."

It would really have been quite something to have seen all that translated onto the screen - culminating in the head of Azog, on a stake, the purse of money stuffed into its mouth. So much more haunting than the psycho albino stalker we got instead.

Ok, so they didn't do Azog properly. What I would like to see at some point in the trilogy, backstory-wise -
*Gandalf's discovery of the broken, half-witted Thráin in the dungeons of Dol Guldur.
*Any reference to the Ring - meaning the last of the Seven.
*And that wonderful line of Gandalf's: "A chance meeting, as we say in Middle Earth."
I wonder if we will get any of it?