The Hobbit the Desolation of Smaug - Reaction

I'm planning on seeing this movie again, but I wanted to make a reaction post. 

First of all, it was EPIC and you should all go see it, several times. 

I've been reading negative reviews from those lucky enough to have seen it before the rest of us and I just can't understand where they're coming from. 

If I had made the Hobbit adaptation it would have been one movie, two maximum, definitely not three. But you know, what? It worked. Jackson and co know how to tell a good, epic tale. If you want the 30-minute short-attention-span version you aren't going to get it with Tolkien in any form. 

There were a couple of things that I didn't really like much, but they are almost insignificant next to the awesomeness of the whole thing. The end of this movie left me with the same happy and mournful feeling that finishing my reading of the LOTR books for the first time left me with. That feeling when you've just been shaken out of a very believable fantasy world you literally feel like you were living in. 

I don't usually just sit there during the credits, but I did this time, until there was only one other person left in the theater at which point I decided I had heard enough of Ed Sheeran's I see Fire to repeat it realistically in my head on the way home, thereby preserving that last lingering memory of the experience. 

The reviews that I was reading generally speaking compared it to the first installment: An Unexpected Journey. And yes, the first movie was long. Yes, it had about a zillion introductions, but it was still an exceptional movie. So when I say that Desolation was better than its predecessor I don't mean to put Unexpected Journey down, I'm just trying to express the level of epicness I have just witnessed. 

Also, why did I just write so many words without once mentioning SMAUG. Smaug was epic as we all knew he would be, but really, there were quite a few stylistic choices in his portrayal that surprised me. And how can you be surprised and thrilled after knowing the book by heart and essentially having seen tens if not hundreds of movie dragons? Go see the movie, you will understand. 

Whoever did the work on Smaug's characterization, because that's what he is: a character has somehow managed to take the most cliche aspect of fantasy and make it real again in a way that puts every other movie dragon in their place - as cheap rip-offs of Smaug. 

Ok, I'll leave the proper review with the few negatives and lots of spoilers later on. For now, this is a movie you won't want to miss.