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Just saw The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey. I personally feel that if The Lord Of The Rings were at all tiresome for you, you'll find something to complain about here. It doesn't have the advantage of being surprisingly good that The Fellowship Of The Ring had, as at the time people were taken aback by seeing Fantasy well done and done in a grown up manner (Harry Potter films grew up (a little) in the years following the Lord Of The Rings). This a very good story and I personally do not feel that it was "padded with filler". It sure is if you don't care about the fore-shadowing of events which lead to The Lord Of The Rings, which I found interesting. I found that it informed the audience nicely to make reference to the growing power of "the necromancer" and showing the ignorance and developing arrogance of Saruman. These things are somewhat necessary as far as bridging scenes to link the trilogies go. The scenes involving Radagast were not "Jar-Jar" like in the slightest as said by one reviewer and I found him to be quite a insular, reclusive wizard whom despite the fact he'd isolated himself, had plenty of common sense and perceptiveness.
The action at times felt a little pedestrian (though not at all times), perhaps mostly due to a focus on the 48fps 3D (I saw 24fps 2d, so some of the dimensional merits of aspects of these scenes may escape me). The apparent new villian for Thorin Oakenshield "Azog", seemed to be an adequately fleshed out character and promising, but still seemed a little too CGI based, unlike Gollum and it slightly hurt his realism, as it did the with the CGI models of actors at times during the Goblin cave escape (they appeared zippy, over animated and jumpy at moments).
Still, all in all Peter Jackson is on the right path here and people may be forgetting that the first stage of any journey is about establishing characters, past present and future plot and direction and tone. I feel he's done well here and deserves more than the "pass" or slightly better he seems to be getting from most. As far as negative criticism goes, there's very little I've read that's analytical about it and it seems to generalize what's supposed to be wrong into witty put downs. All in all, this is no perfect movie, but which one is? Which one deserves to escape criticism?
Lord Of The Rings has set high standards for genre fans of this type of "fantasy road movie", and that's understood, but when compared to that level, this movie does indeed do what it sets out to do, which is to tell The Hobbit and make what would be a dullish movie if it stuck to a page to page conversion an interesting if not overwhelmingly exciting adventure by adding what Jackson and co have found in various appendices.
As far as parts that surprised me? I really didn't think that the dialogue between Galadriel and Gandalf would carry any significance and plot wise it did turn out to be just light exposition, but I felt that Gandalf's speech about the Hobbit and how good is achieved through the little things in the world, by many little acts of goodness day to day, well I don't know about anyone else, but that does get to me.
The riddles in the dark scene is also very well handled and provides a more than satisfactory introduction to Gollum, the only problem being how Jackson will handle the original scene of Bilbo obtaining the ring, as there are obvious differences between LOTR and this scene in An Unexpected Journey.
Anyhow, overall I was more than satisfied and yes, I'd go so far as impressed, just not blown away and to be honest I never expected to be anyhow.
It's not possible to rate this movie on one scale when you have a fair idea of what type of camps people fall into, so I'll say this.
Tolkien Purist: 7
Tolkien Fan (across the board): 8
Lord Of The Rings Movie Fan: 9
General Movie Fan: 7
Thought LOTR was "alright at best": 6 (remember 5 is "average")
That's how I feel people might feel anyhow. It's well worth a look whatever category you fall into.
An excellent first installment of the trilogy. 
