I enjoyed the movie. Attempted to read the book years ago, and found it entirely unreadable and never finished it. It's like nonsensical children's tales and bad songs. Sorry if you're a hardcore Tolkien fan, but this is not an easy to read or well-written book. However, the overall story is good and this movie seemed to capture the essence of it.
The movie felt like an amusement park ride, optimized for 3D, and left you hanging terribly at the end. It was also less severe and serious than LOTR, and more family-friendly. Had some good laughs. It's gonna be a big trilogy deal, so I kind of like that. Something I'll buy when it all comes out as a box set on DVD.
Some of the effects looked kind of weird. I dunno if it was a FPS thing or what, but the motion looked...wrong. This symptom was in LOTR as well.
Not sure if they were using miniatures for this or all CG. Some scenes and characters were obviously pure CG, but the goblin mines looked like it may have been a hybrid miniature-CG scene. I like that. Very cool if model makers somewhere in the world are getting work doing this for the big screen.
Overall, a good holiday movie.