Sometimes a director needs someone to be able to say "no" to them, and PJ doesn't have that. He's so enthusiastic that he can't take that step aside to say "wait a minute - does that actually ADD anything to the story"?. I've worked with directors like that, and you almost always end up with much. Beautiful inventive and well-imagined mush, but it's still mush Which makes me sad.

I would have bought extending it into two films, working the parallel stories of the White Council and the Necromancer alongside Bilbo and the Dwarves. But when I heard it had ballooned to three, this is exactly what I thought was going to happen.

On my own blog I commented "With Gandalf shouting RUN!!! all the time, It got to feeling like an episode of Doctor Who - only beadier"