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One of the things that most interests me about this is that, whether I ever get to actually watch any films in 3D or High Frame Rate or so on, how this new technology is actually impacting the content, the structuring and composition of the film. For instance the different ways of composing shots to make best use of 3D technology - I might be watching the 2D version of a film but the filmmakers will have likely focused on, and composed towards, how the material works primarily to take advantage of the 3D format.

I'm looking forward to pieces (perhaps more from someone like David Bordwell, who has already written some excellent posts on the composition of Dial M For Murder) on how the new technology changes the look and feel of films (the mise-en-scene and staging, duration of shots, editing patterns, the grouping of action in wide shots against close ups, and so on) even when they are 'downgraded' for 2D viewing.

There are certainly shots in THE HOBBIT that are composed to take advantage of 3D, but most of the time Jackson shoots the film the way he shot the LOTR films complete with rack focus effects that are really a no-no when it comes to 3D (why deliberately squash the depth of field when the whole point of 3D is to make that depth more realistic? Not that I mind since I don't like 3D handicapping a cinematographer's choices). In other words, I don't think this film is anymore "3D" than any of Jackson's other films.

I did have to laugh a bit when the spatial relationship between Gandalf and a dwarf is messed up early in the film; it happens in the exact same place (Bilbo's home hallway) as a similar screw-up occurred in FELLOWSHIP OF THE RINGS! A few other similar moments occur (the troll battle), but overall the spatial relationships seem okay. I have no idea whether the 3D helps or hinders this; it probably had little effect.

The 48fps takes a while to get used to, but it's pretty stunning. It does provide a degree of verisimilitude to the plasticy CG monsters, and the Spielberg-esque secape from the mines at the end of the film is sensory overload in this format. The 3D also looks quite natural.

The film itself is terrible. It's bogged down in endless exposition about backstory that serves no purpose but as service to hardcore Tolkien fans, which only detract from any narrative or thematic focus. Bilbo is totally offscreen for far too long. A shame, because Freeman does a good job.
So many hokey villains, so much strained self-serious for such a simple story.

I wonder if Jackson's going to produce a two-hour reduction of all three films in 2015 for the benefit of people who decidedly aren't hardcore Tolkien fans?

Considering that he added yet more scenes to his King Kong remake when pretty much everyone agreed a Director's Cut of KK ought to be shorter, you can safely assume there'll be extended editions of the three new films as well.

The plotting seemed mechanical to me in a way that the LOTR movies didn't. It didn't help that this film repeated most of the beats as Fellowship: huge flashback battle then the opening in the Shire, Gandalf arrives to set things in motion, battle that leads to Rivendell, inching along the mountain cliffs, a big battle underground, and then a final battle where an important member of the group falls to operatic music.

Can't comment on the 3D or HFR since I saw it in 2D. Things did seem to be flying at me an awful lot.

Overall it looked very pretty but seemed reheated otherwise.

I hauled myself in to see this last night so I could judge the 48fps thing for myself.

Well, the terrible things they're saying are all true: the film looks like shit. The shit of a man who has been taking a very powerful laxative. Colours are weak, candied and blown-out, and the whole film looks like a tacky TV show from the 1980s. For a while, I was distracted by a fascinating paradox: the film strives for opulence in every frame, and sure enough you can see the evidence of it all around in the detail of the costumes, the location shooting, the perpetual CGI - and yet the whole thing still looks cheap because of that process.

I guess this is what happens when you're surrounded with yes-men. Did nobody actually have the guts or job security to point out to Jackson how bad this looked? Or did they realize the problem after they'd passed the point of no return and decide to bluff their way into release with lots of media hoopla?

The film itself? Oh my. At least the first loooong section is the worst of it, with the scene (after scene after scene after showtune after scene after showtune after scene) of the dwarves in Bilbo's house playing out like an interminable sitcom for seven year olds. All those domestic interiors and miserably flat characterizations (a big Jackson failing from way back) make this play even more like a daytime soap than it looks. At least when the troupe get on the road you can watch the technology fail in more interesting ways.

One of the film's major faults is that it's so concerned with servicing Tolkein geeks that it loses all sense of proportion and basic filmmaking common sense goes out the window. Tolkein gave us thirteen dwarves, so there will be thirteen, goddammit! However, nobody has the time or energy to flesh out the lower half of that group (who even arrive in an indistinguishable jumble), so for practical purposes there might as well be only six or seven. The only purpose all the supernumary dwarves serve is making every scene they're in harder to block and every set piece more unwieldy and incoherent (and Jackson doesn't need any help in that regard).

There's the same (largely Tolkein-sourced, if I recall correctly) numbing repetitiveness of the action, wherein every single conflict / action set-piece is resolved by the deus-ex-machina last-minute arrival of a third party who previously wasn't even involved (or else a threat, like that of the battling mountains, just suddenly ceases because the dudes turn a corner).

The dull thud of impossible odds / impossible escape is made all the worse by Jackson's Spielbergian cheats in the staging. A horde of orcs, mounted on giant wolves, are only a few hundred metres from horseless dwarves when they spot them, but the chase somehow lasts for minutes of screen time, and when the camera pulls back, they're magically miles away, gaining fast, but never actually reaching them. Or when the arch enemy of a major character, who's been seeking revenge for several hundred years, apparently, decides that he can't be bothered delivering the deathblow, and instead politely summons an underling to do the honours, and said underling hums and haws, and lines up the axe, and thinks about it a bit, and lines up the axe again, and lifts it high above his head, and holds it there a bit, thinking "when's the guy going to realize THIS IS HIS CUE?", and - BAM! WHODATHUNKIT? - he's ambushed by another guy and Major Character gets to live some more. Whew! So near the edge of my seat there I nearly fell asleep.

There's all manner of bozo staging and pacing like that throughout the film - micro-moments like that are wrung out and wrung out until there's nothing left, while other pieces of action whizz by in an affectless digital blur. The dwarves' escape from the goblins is clearly envisaged as a set-piece to end all set-pieces, and indeed it's crammed to the gunwales with nifty bits and pieces of staging, but the problem is that all those nifty bits cancel one another out, if you can even pick them out from the frenzy of activity. It's hard enough to buy the fact that slicing a single rope will detach precisely the section of a precarious footbridge that contains Your Team, and swing them precisely towards the next section of pathway leading to the exit, remaining perfectly intact the whole time, but when variations of the same thing (or gags equally improbable) occur dozens of times in the course of a couple of minutes, they lose all dramatic value, and the supposedly thrilling escape becomes about as suspenseful as "and then they all teleported out of the cave." It's the yes-men problem again: every halfway decent idea becomes scripture, and they all have to be crammed in, with no objective editorial eye as to how it's going to work, or not, as cinema.

Good lord you're overthinking this.

I saw the 48 whatever once just to see it. Agreed it is not the wave of the future, I hope. But in the later, darker, action sequences it was fine and the lack of blur actually was a benefit.

But on IMAX the film looks great. It's a dumb popcorn movie, and as such movies go it is excellent. The three leads are terrific. Maybe too many chase scenes by the big wolf things, but whatever.

Frankly I would rather see a 6-part LotR than a 3-part Hobbit, but I'll take what I can get.

And BTW I am not a Tolkeinite. Never have and never will read the books.

Aren't we on this site to think about movies and share our thoughts? Dismissing some films as popcorn movies and placing others in a "thinking" category is to be rather opposed to that goal. I for one find zedz's criticism very instructive, and valuable.

Hey Brad, you do realize that popcorn movies don't have to be dumb, don't you? And that the ones that aren't are excellenter.

One has to be really afraid of actual thought to think that zedz's comment was "overthinking" the movie anyway. It was a very basic rundown of its merits as a popcorn film, and had such radical intellectual insights as 'looks like shit' and 'too many dwarves'.

Now, myself, I see the movie as a shallow and contradictory dissertation on the systematic discrimation against achondroplasts by society at large. But zedz didn't really go down that road.

Brad wrote:Frankly I would rather see a 6-part LotR than a 3-part Hobbit, but I'll take what I can get.

And BTW I am not a Tolkeinite. Never have and never will read the books.

Nobody but a "Tolkeinite" would want to sit through six movies based off the Lord of the Rings (the movies are already each 3 hours freaking long!)

Brian C wrote:One has to be really afraid of actual thought to think that zedz's comment was "overthinking" the movie anyway. It was a very basic rundown of its merits as a popcorn film, and had such radical intellectual insights as 'looks like shit' and 'too many dwarves'.

To be fair, that's my default appraisal of most movies.

More than 20 lines about this flick is over thinking.

Brad wrote:More than 20 lines about this flick is over thinking.

Well, that explains why you haven't read the book.

More than 486,000 frames is overthinking Tolkien.

I literally can't imagine a movie where you spend three hours watching it and that's cool but writing about it for more than five minutes is more effort than it's worth

Brad wrote:More than 20 lines about this flick is over thinking.

In the interest of precision, I have some follow-up questions:

1) Does this include partial lines? For instance, 8 of zedz's 28 lines were partial lines. So if we include those partials as full lines, we can assign him an Overthought Score of 40, which does seem high. But he only wrote enough words to fill up about 25.2 lines (I did some copying and pasting to get a reasonable approximation, although I'd still say that I have a margin of error of about +/- 0.2 lines). So in this case, his Overthought Score drops to 26, which seems less inappropriate.

2) Does the Overthought Standard that you've outlined here change from film to film? How many lines are permitted in a discussion of Tarkovsky, for example? (Note: let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that we're talking about one of his profound movies like Stalker, and not one of his shallow popcorn movies like The Sacrifice.) Is it a different number than what we'd be allowed for someone as dumb as Peter Jackson?

The Fellowship of the Ring features not one, but four indispensable full length audio commentaries

This is just for the first movie, but I assume that this is applicable to each of them. Also, this is just the tip of the iceberg for extras....

I don't even want to think about how much time and effort was put forth by hundreds of people to actually make the films and the lego sets, t-shirts, video game tie-ins, etc. etc.

So considering the unrelenting bloat, I really appreciate zedz curt dismissal.

I enjoyed The Lord of the Rings even allowing for some of Jackson's extravagances (the whole Legolas skateboard thing, for example). But zedz is absolutely right about this one. The scene in the goblin hall is coals to Newcastle, more coals, a few more coals, choking on coal dust, and a bit more coal for good measure. It and other sequences needlessly extend the running time (okay, so you want to do three movies--do they all have to be three hours long?) and make it a real chore to sit through. This is the wrong vehicle to try to trump The Lord of the Rings, period.

I suspect the inevitable four & a 1/2 Extended Edition will flesh out the thirteen dwarves a little more.

My thoughts about the film:

Loved the film.

Loved dwelling in that world. Loved the careful build-up of the company at Bilbo's home and the contrast of their void the next morning. Loved the spirited adventure, the setting of the chess pieces for the 2nd and 3rd films, and the time to breathe between the action. Loved the bonding over the meaning of Home. Loved the Song of the Lonely Mountain - perhaps the best song in all the films. Loved the Riddles in the Dark.

Loved nearly every minute of it.

Nothing nagged me whatsoever. Is it "indulgent"? Sure, I guess, but I was more than glad for it. The world is too much of a joy to behold and experience for me not to enjoy it.

And the character emotion moments really worked for me. Perhaps because this journey is not the "save the world" journey of LOTR, Gandalf's point about the small things being of the most import rang true to me, and I thought all of that just fit in exceptionally well with the quest for Home and it's central import to Bilbo and the Dwarves - and how that motivated each at key moments.

Frankly, the action scenes were nice and enjoyable but I enjoyed most of the non-action scenes more.

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My thoughts about 48FPS (which I saw the 2nd time I saw the film):

For 85 years, ever since the first synchronized sound films started to gain traction, we have been watching films at 24 frames per second. We've learned through experience that 24fps is "cinematic" as an aesthetic, mostly subconsciously.

Television, on the other hand has always been a little different, especially in the US. At 30fps it has a different "feel", a little closer to sitting across from the person and places on the screen as it "feels" in real life. We've learned to interpret this aesthetic as being less "cinematic" and related to broader types of programming - news, talk shows, sports, sitcoms, etc.

Unlearning this reaction is not an easy task. Most people with an eye for image presentation expect certain touches and rhythm that 24fps provides that isn't *quite* there at 30fps. In the last handful of years HDTVs have had the 120hz mode which essentially doubles the frame rate of TV images, and this only enhances that gap.

The 48fps HFR of The Hobbit isn't quite as jarring as the 120hz for TV, primarily because instead of doubling frames artificially there are ACTUAL frames present in the image. Therefore the clarity and detail is impeccable without the mild "shake" that can be noticed by the keen eyed viewer of 120hz.

That being said, it tweaks the reaction to the presentation. The best way I can describe it is like this: I had the impression that I was sitting on a stage with the actors performing, and therefore felt the artificiality of live theater, which is an odd feeling when you are not really in that setting. Again, this is a learned reaction over time, so it's not necessarily wrong, but just a mismatch for the event of a theatrical film based on experience. If you've ever seen classic BBC Miniseries such as Elizabeth R or any of the Jane Austin adaptations shot on standard def video you may also get what I'm describing. Many call it the so-called "soap opera" look, which is apt because daytime soaps for decades were shot on 30fps video.

Then, at moments of vistas and wide shots of cities, it reminded me eerily of travel TV programs. Rick Steves' Middle Earth, if you will. Which is to say, the scope of perception was again changed. My inherent reaction to that is to not think of narrative storytelling, but of sight seeing if I ever visited France. Once again... just odd.

So, in short, in HFR it's the best looking travelogue miniseries chapter I've ever seen, but it just doesn't have that nuance of 24fps that my mind thinks of when I think of "cinema".

I'm reminded of the old adage about Technicolor vs. Black & White for films in the 30s-40s. Technicolor was used for hyper-realism, to accentuate the non-reality of the vibrancy of the colors, while black & white, because it was so associated with film Newsreels of the time, felt more "real" to the audiences of their day. This tendency was eventually unlearned and we all now accept the more natural color photography to be quite pleasing aesthetically and for what we consider realism, while BOTH classic Technicolor and Black & White films seem distant and artificial in their own ways. Will HFR 48fps eventually be accepted for theatrical feature films the way we've come to accept modern color photography? Perhaps. But it will be a long way to break 85 years of learned subconscious expectations.

A whopping total of thirteen minutes added back in-- all extensions, no new scenes

They have to leave something for the next two three-hour movies.