I have now seen the film twice, once in 3D and once in 2D. The difference makes little difference to me. I would have foregone the illusion of depth for a bit more of the reality in any case. I also can’t see any difference due to the thing being shot at 48 frames per second rather than the conventional 24, although much atmosphere has been heated by film-buffy pundits anent this weighty matter…
At one point Bilbo says “OK”, an expression from West over a very different Sea than Tolkien’s, and which duly elicited a shudder (nothing beside the reaction this crass Americanism would have received from the good Professor Tolkien himself I suspect!). We shall be fortunate not to see the dread Golden Arches rising above Hobbiton in future instalments at this rate 
.
Also, whilst much of the New Zealand scenery is appropriately awe-inspiring, Tolkien was clear that his tale was set in an earlier version of NW Europe, if not England, and he would have expected its natural history to reflect this. Jackson simply got in a muddle here.
Sebastian the Ailing Hedgehog will correctly have seemed exotic to Americans, as these charming little creatures of the English countryside (and my garden) do not occur, in any form, in North America. I suspect Jackson’s spiny Sebastian probably does not owe his name to the fact that with his arrows pointing outwards he reverses the means of martyrdom of his sanctified namesake.
However at one point Radagast the Far Out, Man, converses with an American Robin, whose European relative – the Song Thrush, not the Real British Robin Redbreast – plays an important role in the story later. Whilst his bizarre Bugs-Bunnymobile crashes through a Kiwi forest which would strike Tolkien, accustomed to English oak and beech woods, as distinctly exotic. Some of the background birdsong heard therein likewise doubtless comes from Antipodean avifauna with consonantally-deprived Maori names unlikely ever to have delighted the ears of the Hobbit’s author in his North Oxford garden.
Calling the phasmid the Wizard of Odd is interrupted by his more authentic-appearing brother Istari apparently in the process of ingesting a “stick insect” instead of its American name, “walking stick”, does not make it any more authentically an indigenous English insect. Although ironically in recent years New Zealand stick insects/walking sticks have now got loose and are rampaging through Devon and Cornwall.
Finally the night-time wildlife noises we hear outside Bag End owe more to a Georgia swamp than the idealised rustic England which is the Shire, where foxes may bark and owls may hoot but never the chirr of a cricket, the scrape of a cicada or the mating cry of some bizarre bullfrog is heard…
Hmm. Jackson is a New Zealander, and chose (so he said) to shoot LOTR there primarily because (so he said) he loved his country. I believe, however, that Tolkien loved his country as well? Selznick chose to shoot Gone With the Wind in the red clay hills of Georgia, not under his own conveniently nearby palm trees of California, much as he may have loved them.
I think I’m going to forego The Hobbit. In retrospect, I see how much horrendous damage was done to LOTR by Jackson’s doin ‘is thang. When I read your Radagast the Ridiculous, I knew for certain—no way. Radagast was next to holy for me.