Review of The Hobbit Movie

For many teenage boys in my generation, Tolkien's books have almost become almost an icon of our childhoods.  As children we are told stories of elves and dwarves.  These stories are some of the first tales that we are told that we can remember.  For the rest of our lives, we look for stories like these to remind us of our childhoods.  I personally loved the Lord of the Rings series, and have watched them all at least a dozen times.  So when I was told that "The Hobbit" was going to be made into three separate movies, I was ecstatic.  The thought of a book like "The Hobbit" being made into a movie with modern special effects filled me with joy.  When the movie was released, I was there for the midnight release.  I was surprised by how many people were at the theater.  I knew that "The Hobbit" was highly anticipated, but I did not expect to almost not be able to find a seat in the theater.  When I first saw the movie, I was very happy.  I thought the director did a fantastic job allowing his audience to know the dwarves on a more personal level, something that was never done in the book.  The first hour of the movie is devoted to learning more about the dwarves and why they are attempting to regain their city.  I also enjoyed the amount of detail that was put into making the dwarves look like what everyone thought they would have looked like based on the description given in the book.  When I finished watching the movie for the first time, I thought that I needed to watch it again.  I realized that after watching the movie once, all I had noticed is what Peter Jackson had done right, now I needed to watch the movie again to see what I did not like from the movie.  Upon my second viewing, I noticed that Jackson had changed many things from the book.  I understand that a lot of these changes were to make the story easily told in a movie, but they changed the story greatly.  Jackson added a new antagonist to the film, a white orc whose sole goal is to kill Thorin and his fellow dwarves.  I am unsure as to whether or not I like this addition to the movie.  While the new antagonist allows the movie to be followed easily, the movie becomes less what I imagined it would be like.  Jackson also added a new wizard to the movie as a comic relief point after a moment of immense action.  This part was not really needed in the movie.  Jackson devoted about twenty minutes to the introduction of the new wizard, which was not necessary at all.  The new wizard, along with the white orc, were both strategically added to make the story more "movie friendly", and while they weren't extremely necessary, they both added to an already fantastic movie.