Personally my friends and I didn’t like the first Hobbit movie, so I’m honestly amazed the sequels got made.
I am like the lone apologist for those films.
I picked up the Extended Cut DVD’s the other day from Walmart and I just got through the first one last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. I haven’t gotten through the entire trilogy yet, but if the next two movies are as good as the first, I’ll put them on par with the LOTR Trilogy.
They aren’t as good as LOTr, I freely admit that. They have lots of problems, and there are huge chunks of them that you could cut out. But the accusation that they’re as bad as the Star Wars prequels is frankly just insane. The casting alone puts them head and shoulders above.
They have some of the same issues, being prequels and all, but their major faults are being terrible adaptations of the book.
I think part of them are terrific adaptations of the book; the first hour or so of the first movie is almost word-for-word. The stuff they added in that’s actually in Tolkien is pretty good; the Dol Goldur stuff, etc. The material they just added to pad things out like the inter-species romance, not so much.