So, as you might have been able to tell from my first post about The Hobbit, the movie gave me a lot of feels. Most of which came from the fact that I wanted to like it a lot more than I did - not that I didn't like it, I did quite a bit, but I was still kind of disappointed in the final product. Which led pretty directly to me writing a "review" which didn't actually say anything useful at all, but whined a lot and threw in some stuff about dwarves. This addendum is my attempt to say something substantive about the movie itself.
I did not see The Hobbit in 48fps, or even in IMAX. Because of this I didn't have the hyper-realism issue that many people have been complaining about; however (and I don't know if this is BECAUSE I saw it in standard form, or if everyone had this problem), there were several panoramic scenes that ended up blurry and headache-y for me. This was especially problematic because they were scenes I wanted to see - the opening scene of Erebor, the dwarven city, for example, and the goblin underground compound. New Zealand is used to great effect, and Jackson definitely remembers how to use great sweeping panoramas to good effect, but the film is a little heavy on the scenery porn, which matters more because of how padded the movie already feels.
The scale of the movie is pretty grand - Jackson proved he was great at doing epics with LOTR, and he brings that same sense of grandeur to The Hobbit. It works to mediate some of the tonal dissonance that the film has, since there's not as much of that weighty feeling to the book; The Hobbit adapted scenes are very true to the spirit of the book - lighter, with some levity, while the material from the ROTK appendices (most particularly a meeting between Gandalf, Galadriel, Sarumon and Elrond) is more serious, more ponderous. While individually, every scene is pretty great, they don't transition very well.. The opening sequence, where we learn the history of the dwarves and their homeland, gives gravity to the story; as I'm thinking about it right now, part of the problem I may be having is that we got the big sweeping epic FIRST and are only now going back to the prequel story, which puts more expectation on The Hobbit to be similar to LOTR in terms of tone and feeling. Jackson does a good job of incorporating his extra material, showing that the story he's trying to tell is bigger than just The Hobbit text, but staying true to all his sources hurts him in terms of meshing the elements together.
All in all, The Hobbit was an enjoyable, but flawed, experience. I think we were all expecting something more, which is why it's getting so slammed in reviews right now - it's a pretty good movie, and we were expecting something great. I hope parts two and three deliver a little bit more.
I did not see The Hobbit in 48fps, or even in IMAX. Because of this I didn't have the hyper-realism issue that many people have been complaining about; however (and I don't know if this is BECAUSE I saw it in standard form, or if everyone had this problem), there were several panoramic scenes that ended up blurry and headache-y for me. This was especially problematic because they were scenes I wanted to see - the opening scene of Erebor, the dwarven city, for example, and the goblin underground compound. New Zealand is used to great effect, and Jackson definitely remembers how to use great sweeping panoramas to good effect, but the film is a little heavy on the scenery porn, which matters more because of how padded the movie already feels.
The scale of the movie is pretty grand - Jackson proved he was great at doing epics with LOTR, and he brings that same sense of grandeur to The Hobbit. It works to mediate some of the tonal dissonance that the film has, since there's not as much of that weighty feeling to the book; The Hobbit adapted scenes are very true to the spirit of the book - lighter, with some levity, while the material from the ROTK appendices (most particularly a meeting between Gandalf, Galadriel, Sarumon and Elrond) is more serious, more ponderous. While individually, every scene is pretty great, they don't transition very well.. The opening sequence, where we learn the history of the dwarves and their homeland, gives gravity to the story; as I'm thinking about it right now, part of the problem I may be having is that we got the big sweeping epic FIRST and are only now going back to the prequel story, which puts more expectation on The Hobbit to be similar to LOTR in terms of tone and feeling. Jackson does a good job of incorporating his extra material, showing that the story he's trying to tell is bigger than just The Hobbit text, but staying true to all his sources hurts him in terms of meshing the elements together.
All in all, The Hobbit was an enjoyable, but flawed, experience. I think we were all expecting something more, which is why it's getting so slammed in reviews right now - it's a pretty good movie, and we were expecting something great. I hope parts two and three deliver a little bit more.
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