Okay, so as we know, Tauriel is a bit... uh, let's say fickle. We have a scene of her mooning about over Legolas, followed nearly instantly by her falling for Kili. That's one of her personality traits. The other? A violent hatred of orcs, to the point where she'll disobey direct orders so she can kill some more.

Oh, wait, one more: she doesn't think locking the gates and letting the world go hang is a good idea.

Thranduil, now... is a raging xenophobe. He kind of was one in the book, but he's dialled it up to 27 here. He's actually nicer towards Thorin, but refuses to even consider fighting outside his borders - and is racist towards Silvan elves. Which is weird, what with his kingdom being made entirely of them.

So where'd that come from? Well, let's take a look at Thranduil's history:

-Born and/or lived a long time in Doriath. Doriath was populated almost exclusively by Sindarin elves. It was defended by a magical barrier which kept evil entirely out, but left the rest of Beleriand to get utterly wrecked. Sound familiar? Movie!Thranduil's strategy is Thingol and Melian's strategy.

-Driven out of Doriath by the combined violence of dwarves (who killed Thingol) and Noldor (who killed everyone else). Gosh, I wonder why he hates dwarves so much? The death of Thingol, by the way, is the origin of the elf-dwarf feud. And a very shiny rock was involved...

-Moved with his father to Mirkwood Greenwood, where they spent a couple of thousand years ruling a bunch of Silvan elves before they...

-Went to the War of the Last Alliance, where Thranduil's father was killed. That war, by the way, is the one that was caused by the Noldor and the Numenoreans feuding with a renegade Maia who the Valar failed to properly deal with. Literally everyone is to blame for Thranduil's father getting killed.

-So now he's stuck in a woodland realm which is slowly going to pot, in rather grotty halls (compared to the grandeur of Menegroth in Doriath - or of Erebor, for that matter; this is why he wants Thorin's gold and gems, to make his home into something he can think of as worth having. It may also be why he drinks so much ;)).

-He's also surrounded by his social inferiors. Now, Thingol was quite good at dealing with Silvan folk - some of them saved him in the First Battle of Beleriand, after all - but they were the ones who kept heading west, even if they took a while to do it. The elves of Mirkwood (and Lorien, for that matter) are the ones who gave up completely. Compared to the Sindar, they're layabouts. And the Sindar are the only elves in Middle-earth who never compromised. The Noldor got kill-happy in Aman. The Silvan elves, and the Avari if any of them ever show up, wussed out of the Great March. The Sindar? They're the ones who stayed in Middle-earth to search for their king - and found both him and his Maia bride. Even if he wasn't born then, that's a decent amount of cultural pride.

Does Thranduil have a reason to be racist against Silvan elves? No - but given that he's busy hating literally everyone else, I rather suspect he's narrowed his 'acceptable people' definition down to 'Sindar'. He does, at least, seem not to be too angry at Elrond (at least, he was willing to send his son off to visit a few decades later), and Elrond is the last non-mortal descendant of Thingol and Melian.

But what about Tauriel? We know why she hates orcs so much - her parents were killed by them. We don't need a reason for her to think ignoring the world is a bad idea - it is a bad idea, and anyone other than the brainwashed-by-his-racist-dad prince would agree (and, actually, Legolas does agree - or at least go along with it). But the bizarre romance angle?

Well, let's look at her role model. For 600 years (possibly her entire life, but a long time at any rate), Tauriel has been raised by Thranduil... who is racist against her and has no qualms about saying so. Her emotional contact with the person who shapes her worldview consists of him saying 'You are worthless'.

So I figure, she's a bit messed up. She doesn't know what affection feels like. She has four emotional responses in her repertoire:

-Hatred. She hates orcs. Hate hate hate.
-Nothing. She's a captain of the guard - but we never hear anything about the people she serves with, or commands. They seem to be little more than tools in her quest to wipe the orcs off the face of the planet. Look at how she treats... is it Bofur she grabs the athelas from? He's a tool, useful for her goal, then ignored.
-Sorrow. She is sad at... well, Thranduil. Probably she doesn't like people being racist about her when she can't hate them.
-????. There's a fourth emotion she hasn't felt very often. She feels it about Legolas (her pseudo-brother), and about Kili (because he's young and she first met him by saving his life - he's almost like a younger brother, really). Most people would just call this 'affection', or even just 'liking someone'. Tauriel? She's got zero emotional baseline. She calls it love.

hS

When Bilbo kills the trapdoor spider, the only thought going through my head was "My peanut."
My time is coming. Be afraid.

Visually pretty awesome, they did succeed in not reducing Tauriel to a romance plot (if you're going to add someone, make it worth it,) Bard and Beorn were awesome, but

a) Convection? What convection? It makes some sense that Smaug shook off being laminated in gold, but nobody else should be able to shrug off all the fire.

b) Daylight Orcs again, you can imagine how I feel about those.

c) They made mirkwood about the size of a city park. I understand that they wanted to get to the action, but they made the walk to Dol Gildur so short that they had to lock up Gandalf for his absence when the dragon was woken to be credible.

d) Reusing scenes. Tauriel shining through and Gandalf being imprisoned reminded me a bit too much of similar scenes from Lord of The Rings.

E) If they were going for vermissilitude, they could have made the mirkwood spiders closer to Shelob's design, given that there's one species of great big giant spider in Arda, and they come from Ungoliant.

f) I dunno how Jackson can know all about the birth of the sun and moon and why the elves love stars, but not get that we don't get daylight-walking orcs, and that there's a good reason for that.

The acting and the setmaking and the music was magnificent, though.

There were plenty of things that didn't make a lot of sense, in some cases because it felt like some scenes were cut, but in others just because something strange or silly just decided to happen. Like [SPOILERS TO FOLLOW] that bit at the end, where the dwarves make a giant dwarf out of molten gold, and then it explodes all over Smaug? What were they expecting to gain out of that? Did they want to sear off his scales with the metal? If so, why make the molten metal into the shape of a giant dwarf? Plus, Smaug's heatproof, isn't he? He's a fire-dragon! On a related note, when the big metal dwarf first showed up, the camera held so long on a shot of its face that I halfway expected its eyes to open and it to swing its giant axe at Smaug. It would've been incredibly silly, of course, but come on, a giant golden dwarf fighting a dragon in an underground castle, even if it's only for the few seconds it takes for the dragon to melt it into a pile of slag? It would've been pretty awesome, in my opinion, even though it would've completely gone against the tone of the rest of the movie.

As for Tauriel, she didn't seem like too much of a Sue. I mean, she had her speshul moments, but she's a Tolkien Elf. She's going to have those. Legolas had loads during the original three movies. My main problem regarding her was the shoehorned-in romance between her and Kíli. It felt like the writers realized "Wait! We haven't given the dwarves anything individually to do for the whole movie yet! Let's make one of them and the new elf we just created hit on each other!" And then at the end, where she saves his life with "elvish medicine", which essentially consisted of "doing what the dwarves were going to do, but while chanting and backlit with a Light of Glowing Significance", the romantic subtext came across as so forced that I half-expected Kíli to say that dreaded "it must be an angel" line that comes up whenever the writers can't think of how to make romance go. Granted, there are no angels in Arda, but there aren't any angels in Star Wars either, and Young Anakin said a variation the line in Phantom Menace.
But all in all, Tauriel had plenty of cool things to do that didn't forcibly upstage or sideline others(unlike Legolas, who sidelines the dwarves so hard during one scene that he uses their heads as stepping-stone to shoot arrows at the orcs and the dwarves don't so much as complain), didn't make the plot serve her, and didn't really drive anyone aside from Kíli too out-of-character, aside from one odd moment of stalker!Legolas, so I say she's passable.

But Smaug was awesome, the spiders were awesome(and I liked the change they made so that instead of the spiders being able to talk all the time, Bilbo could only hear and understand their speech while he's touching the Ring, because it makes a bit more sense that way), I liked how some of the dwarves split off from the crowd in the Lake Town section so that there could be two groups doing two things, rather than one group with half a dozen redundant members, and all in all, I'm glad I watched it.

Oh, and a proposition for this movie's exclamation, in the vein of the "Flaming Denethor!" and "Radagast on a Bunny Sled!" Creative Curses from the previous two: Barrel-Busting Bombur! It's named for the scene where Bombur's barrel rolls out of the river, smashing up several orcs as it passes, immediately followed by Bombur busting his arms and legs out of the barrel, grabbing two axes that were tossed to him, and whaling on several more orcs that were unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. It's been a while since I read The Hobbit, but I think I'd remember if something like that was in there.
Honestly, though, it was one of my favorite scenes in the movie. It was just so over-the-top silly, and gave one of the dwarves something unique to do that didn't revolve around ascribed roles like "the old guy who knows things", "the stalwart leader", "the comic relief", or "the fanservice". At the same time, though, it's memorable and canon-incompatible enough to be given expression status, and it's alliterative, too, for an added bonus.
Alternatively, it could be something on how Smaug and Thranduil were constantly monologuing. I'm pretty sure that breaks canon, too, but it's not nearly as memorable.

and thought,"OMG! THE HOBBIT WAS AWESOME!" Well, she's not into the Tolkien fandom, but she is a fangirl anyway. So...apparently she thought Tauriel was awesome, "not a Sue", because she [SPOILER ALERT!] healed Kili when he was "mortally wounded" (oh, of course the "hot dwarf" must be wounded, Jackson. And healed with Athelas.) and defied Thranduil's orders to go kill orcs in Laketown with Legolas. [END SPOILER] But then, my friends actually wouldn't recognise a Sue even if it's dancing naked in front of them.

She also thought Legolas has the most swag in the world. Er...

I'm still apprehensive, with the number of spoilers and reviews I read about the Movie "dividing the Movie fans and the purists more than ever", and the Movie would "cause heated debates among fans for years". Plus, my friend enjoyed the movie as another movie, without having read the books.

~Autumn

I'm going to give my full thoughts a few days, a) for them to gather better and b) so people have a reasonable chance at catching the film before I go all critic-y, but while I liked a fair bit of it it felt somehow underwhelming. A lot of moments where I went "Really, Jackson?" or "That's it?"