10 Worst Changes Peter Jackson Made To The Hobbit
4. Using CGI For F**king Everything
One of the things that grounded Jackson's original trilogy, was the use of prosthetic make-up for his characters, and expansive set designs for his locations. When you're creating a fantasy world, you want to do everything you can to help the audience suspend disbelief. You're already asking them to believe in dragons, orcs and dwarves, so anything you can do to make the world feel more grounded in reality, is essential.
Jackson understood this for The Lord of the Rings. Sure, he used CGI, but only when other means wouldn't work; it augmented his scenes rather than made them. Well, Jackson threw all that out the window with the Hobbit. Go through frame by frame, every other shot has some form of CGI in it. The orcs were mostly CGI, everything looked like it was shot on green screen, and entire sequences were created in a computer.
The gritty realism, that was so well captured in The Lord of the Rings, was replaced with obvious and cheap movie trickery, born out of a need to extend sequences way beyond what was necessary.