The Hobbit.

It is now official.

Peter Jackson is in fact George Lucas.

The Hobbit is to The Lord of the Rings what The Phantom Menace was to the Star Wars franchise.

After sitting through it I have come to the conclusion that it is little more than a cash generator.

Not the sort that has the obligatory tracksuit wearing lad with an x-box 360 under his arm hangs about outside, but the sort that is a movie that is churned out to line the pockets of a studio.

That they made a trilogy out of such a slim volume from Tolkien should have rang alarm bells, but there was so much goodwill left over from the Lord of the rings that I suppose many of us were willing to wait and see if the reason was that Jackson and his crew were going to make a super literal adaptation and blow our tiny minds with it.

Sadly that doesn't appear to be the case and the first instalment is more a snide dipping of our pockets.

It's not all bad, but it's also very far from being all good either.

Is it possible that they slashed the SFX budget so they could pay their extras?

I don't know, but resurrecting a tired and battered old Morph from Take Hart to play the Pale Orc wasn't that impressive.

Morph looks as if he has hit the crack cocaine since his days of riding high as a children's favourite to.

I kept expecting him to ride into battle with a piece of cardboard proclaiming he was homeless, hungry, and in need of urgent dental treatment.

The CGI baddies were shockingly retro looking as a whole to be honest.

Films with a fraction of the budget that this had often do a better job.

Even the make up department need a good talking to.

As the movie is set before Lord of the rings then couldn't they have put a bit more slap on Gandalf?

That was something that was pointed out by a friend (Hi Claire), and another was that if the bird could have taken them straight to the ancestral home of the dwarves then they could have covered the story in two films rather than three.

It's all true.

I'm open to the trilogy redeeming itself over the next to installments  but right now I'm largely unimpressed with the taster we have before us.

The Hobbit is a bit like those smaller studio films that you get that ride in on the coat tails of the big blockbuster.

The ones that are £3 in Tesco and are probably overpriced by at least £2.90.