Oh, Taylor Kitsch. Hollywood had such high hopes for you. Why does your agent hate you? Terribly miscast again, Kitsch trudges through cumbersome dialogue, and for huge chunks of film, is acting against CGI characters.

The movie never gets momentum in character development. It opens with distractingly bad beard/scraggle makeup on Kitsch that is so faulty, you can miss a 5 minute gag with Bryan Cranston. This 5 minute gag is the only part where you can say they included "character development". But it's slight at best.
You can never connect with Kitsch's character anywhere in the movie. He is surrounded by interesting actors, and large set pieces but none of them add up to a cohesive story.
Though each set piece is setup, sometimes very early, as a necessary plot point, they aren't. They are ridiculous, overly shiny CGI, 3D masturbatory fantasies of producers who equate quantity with quality.

The best bit of writing and acting is the LAST scene. It made me care about the characters, the adventure and the possibility that there are more stories. But it was so late in the game that I literally had to question HOW MUCH it made me care. Was it just good relative to the REST of the story? Or was it actually good?

I hope for the latter.