Fans waited nearly a decade for Peter Jackson to return to Middle-earth, and he finally kicked off an entire new trilogy last year with the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  While the critical reaction to the film wasn’t as unanimously positive as the reviews the Lord of the Rings trilogy received, some fans were pleased with how the first installment of this Hobbit adaptation turned out.  The second entry, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, is now in theaters everywhere, and while it’s definitely an improvement from Unexpected Journey, I’m still not convinced that the Hobbit series warrants an entire trilogy of films.  The bloat factor continues to bog down the story, but I’m interested to see if the added material is justified in next year’s concluding chapter The Hobbit: There and Back Again.

Now that the film is out in theaters and Matt’s review is on the site, we’d like to hear your reactions to The Desolation of Smaug.  Were you pleased with the new character additions?  Did the Smaug reveal deliver?  How does the film stack up to Unexpected Journey?  Sound off in the comments after the jump.

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