To a certain extent, they HAD to make it a prequel. In The Hobbit, the elves enjoy a lot of silliness, which would be a jarring change to someone who watched LOTR. So would be their tendency to do evil things, or to be greedy, which results in the Elvish King marching an army to attack the dwarves.
OTOH, the cave chase was stupid. It was truly Bilbo Meets Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Unhappily, too many movies have conditioned audiences to spectacular chases. Dwarves running thru tunnels with an occasional arrow shot at them would seem too tame. After all, an occasional arrow wouldn’t even get a wry remark out of James Bond, so why should Gandalf be scared?
It was also wrong to change Bilbo’s character, and have him save Thorin at the burning tree. I think the biggest problem is they decided to make 3 movies. Two would have been plenty, and it would have allowed Bilbo to change at the right pace. He sees heroism, but he doesn’t ever act heroic until he is separated from the dwarves and forced to make decisions on his own. But they didn’t want the entire movie to go by with Bilbo looking meek...
In the end, I felt much like I did with LOTR: it does a good job of creating Middle Earth and making it look real, but it “King Kong”s the story while doing it. There are too many times Jackson wants to wow the audience instead of trusting them to appreciate things over time.
And goodness knows, the Hobbit movies have a LOT of time! They are turning a very good 5 hour movie into a so-so 9 hour movie...
:>(
I think they could have showed the sense of humor and fun of the elves more then they did. Bilbo sees it as silliness, but that doesn’t mean it’s all there is to elves. It could be easily portrayed as Bilbo’s perception, not objective reality.
Also, Silvan elves are not High Elves, though their leaders often were. They were very different people culturally. LOTR deals almost exclusively with High Elves, and their leaders at that. There is no particular reason to believe all elves everywhere were so deadly serious all the time.
Agree with the rest of your comment.