I finally saw the first of the three part (oh, no) Hobbit movie on DVD the other night. It sucks. It truly sucks. Mostly because, unlike the Lord of The Rings, The Hobbit isn’t at all faithful to Tolkien’s work.
It starts off with an unnecessary prologue, introduces new, dopey characters, invents a new plot line that is totally unnecessary and compresses some key details in Tolkien’s fine story into a stale cinematic mush. Then it glides off into Hollyweird cliche with trite scenes and dumb characterizations and way too much contemporary dialogue: “Chips, anyone?” “Put that in your cakehole,” et-awful-cetera. I gave up after an hour and found a book to read.
The Ring trilogy was almost too faithful to Tolkien, which is why it was so long. The Hobbit is a bastardization of his tight, almost claustrophobic little adventure tale—until the very majestic end—into just more sweeping landscapes, slavering orcs, sword and battle ax scenes ad awful. Yech
If you haven’t seen it and you have read the book, steer clear. I wish I had.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
Yeah, I was not impressed with the film. The Ring movie,however, I was impressed. I’m not sure why I felt that way. Burnout on the fantasy genre, maybe. Or like you said, too much departure from the book. I will probably watch the other two Hobbit flicks, but on TV, not at the movies.
The Ring movies were just about pure Tolkien, i.e. super original. Hobbit I, departing from Tolkien, becomes a mish-mash of Hollywood cliches. Just tired. The next two will be just more of the same. The book is sooo much better. And after seeing the Ring movies the book is a lot easier to visualize.