Recent DVD viewing was pretty excruciating. THE HOBBIT was rank. I have never been able to get into reaing Tolkein, but I did enjoy the LORD OF THE RINGS films, and didn't expect this latest effort to be so very poor. I don't know if it looked better in 3D, but all the actors had a strange uncanny valley look about them, as if they were GCI'd . Gollum, actually, looked more 'real' than everyone else. I did rather like the Stone Giants and the enormous rescue eagles at the end, but they accounted for about one minute of the hours of portentious piffle that I half-watched. Major turkey...Almost as dire was INTO THE WONDER, Terence Malick's latest. Strange that something so beautiful to look at can be so boring and vacant. The characters had very little life to them, and there was no story, to speak of. So there.
Looking back at your post - yes, I thought the stone giants were great, but the eagles just annoyed me by reminding me that the whole of LOTR could have been avoided by getting the eagle to take Frodo to Mt Doom as well as from. That's a plot hole and a half.