How will you be seeing 'The Hobbit'? In 3D? IMAX? 48fps? Digital? 4K? (Page 6 of 7)

Well, I just saw The Hobbit in 3D HFR. I have some thoughts, and I haven't seen the particular thoughts I have anywhere else so far, so perhaps they're even interesting.

No, I didn't hate it. Yes, I got a headache. More on those things in a minute.

Here's something that intrgued me: very early on, I noticed that (framerate shock aside) I was doing alright with it, but every now and then, a shot would happen where NOPE NOPE NOPE. A few minutes later, I thought I had noticed a trend. I had a theory. A half an hour later, I had confirmed it, and it held true for the rest of the movie.

It's not that HFR "doesn't work," for me. It's not even that HFR "doesn't work in action scenes." It's a very specific distinction. HFR doesn't work when panning. The grand Z-axis shots, or the calmer dolly shots, were fine. A little jarring for "never seen that before" reasons, but not fundamentally offensive to my brain. But panning, especially quick panning, is dizzying and awful.

And I think I even know why.

HFR does do one thing, and there doesn't seem to be much argument about it: it does make everything feel more grounded in reality. Most people hate it and reject it out of hand as being uncinematic, some people are into it, but at least we can all agree that it is much closer to the experience of being there. (Being there, in this case, means being on a set. Many have complained.)

And here's the thing: your brain does not pan. Your brain can walk forward in the world (by, uh, walking) and your brain can crane up (climbing stairs), but your brain has never in your life "panned." When sweeping your eyes across a vista, you don't - you can't - move your eyes at a constant rate across it and take in details as you smoothly wipe past. Your eyes dart across the panorama, microsaccading in little jolts, separating it from what would be a pan by condensing it into what your brain registers as still frames along the way.

This isn't such a problem at 24, because it's a bit... well, strobe-y. It may make you feel a touch queasy, but it's nothing we're not all used to by now. But in HFR, it's like spinning in a chair. (With your eyes glued perfectly forward.) It's a fundamentally wrong thing that your brain can't deal with. And it's kind of revolting.

And boy oh boy, does this effect ever worsen when the lenses get longer. The more zoomed in, the flatter the shot, ugh. You're just compounding it. Now you're spinning on a chair and looking through a toilet paper roll.

Many folks hate all of it, I don't. I actually rather liked large swaths of this framerate. Which should carry some weight here: I'm officially an intrigued apologist. I'm not dismissing anything, much less dismissing it out of hand, so take my full meaning: panning does not fucking work. Some folks might hate all of it, some folks might be okay with it, but regardless... no. No on the panning, guys.

When not panning, and not being too frenetic*, I actually kinda liked it. Eventually even stopped noticing it for minutes on end. (Especially in the giant rock monster fight. Possibly because of the artificial slow-mo feeling evoked by them being so huge.) I didn't have problems with the "lighting," as some have, or feeling like I was on the set. I felt like I was in the world, and a couple of times a setting was a bit too shabby for the format, but mostly it felt... like a play. Sort of. Didn't bug me.

However. And here's our asterisk.

* PETER YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A FUCKING DICK ABOUT IT AND FILL THE FIRST TEN MINUTES WITH NOTHING BUT BRAIN-MELTING ZOOMED-IN SWEEPING CAMERA MOVES.

Good god. Keep it on a tripod for a while, shit. It's an oft-repeated claim that the "ugh" feeling wears off a bit after the first ten minutes - I'm rather convinced it's not that you get used to it in ten minutes, I think it's just that about ten minutes in, the prologue ends, and everything fucking calms down for a second. Seriously. It's almost obnoxious the way the first ten minutes go. I guess it's subjective, and most of the world just subjectively disagrees with Pete, because a choice like that might otherwise be called "unflinching" or "confident" on his part. In this case, it's borderline... like I said. Obnoxious. Give us a second, bro.

And that leads me to my final point. It takes a Cameron to use the Hollywood machine as his personal RnD department and figure out stereo filmmaking, and it takes a Peter Jackson to flex nuts and make a thousand theaters release in an almost unprecedented format...

...but...

...as much as Peter Jackson was the nigh-perfect choice for LOTR (and even The Hobbit!), and as much as he is personally interested in high framerate filmmaking, Peter Jackson is not the right filmmaker to introduce it to the world. He's too prone to weirdo giant camera moves and high-speed rakethroughs of giant setpieces. He's too loud, in terms of blocking. Half of LOTR, and half of The Hobbit, are shots like that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where the camera soars through the cave in Zion over the rave. It's pretty much the same thing, in fact... with the notable (and un-ignorable) exception that while that camera move is happening, he'll whip pan left or some shit.

You're killing us, Pete.

So no. I don't hate HFR. I could see it working especially well for non-narrative formats (Cirque du Soleil, documentaries, concerts, etc.) and potentially even catching on for tripod movies. (Any tripod movie. Any movie where they use a goddamned tripod.) But for the above reasons, it may be quite a while before people natively accept it for any form of media wherein the camera is zoomed in and on a helicopter.

...

Oh, and I liked the movie. Sure it felt fluffy, but no more fluffy than the extended editions. The thing that was the most distracting was the fat dwarf, to be honest, and the spectrum of nose-sizes on display.

One last bit, and spoilers to follow.

The complaint that the fridge is nuked by all these elaborate terror-escape scenes wherein nobody dies interests me. I agree - but I think the fact that it's a problem rests entirely upon the choice to make the novel into three movies. It works both ways: on one hand, we're now a third of the way through the book - presumably before any characters who WILL eventually die have died - and, additionally, needing to stretch out the movie over such a thin slice of book requires lengthening battle scenes, thereby making them seem all the more unlikely to be survivable. Weird.

Anyway, I enjoyed the flick.

Ha! Polarize! 3D!

*sits back down*

Very cool post. Cool ideas.

I think you'd definitely notice that.

Red we're actually on the same page when it comes to this. I think I just didn't really convey what I meant properly. I don't think that the book (meaning the plot and the story and what actually happens) needs to be fixed, in fact I said almost as much,

But what needed to be fixed was the tone of the book, the fact that the narrator had this nostalgic,gaussian blurred bokeh sense of the events as he was retelling them to us. What I think needed to happen was for Jackson to strip the story of that overlaying sense of nostalgia, down to it's bare bones. And then build it back up in the actual universe of Middle Earth that has already been built, and that we know to be middle earth.

ALthough I don't agree about all the extra stuff being added being the cause of the movies failing. Honestly the necromancer stuff and everything else could have been amazing if it had taken place in the Middle Earth of The Lord of The Rings. But instead Jackson took these very scary concepts and tried to force and cram them into this weird storybookland tone, and it feels completely out of place and just...horrible.

I do agree about the crowded fights and lack of physics, but that really just ties into the fact that the entire movie has that weird storybookland overcoating to it.

We'll add Teague's 'HFR & Panning' concern to the existing pile of various reactions to HFR.
Comparing the IMAX 24fps and the 48fps versions, I actually prefer the smoother panning of the 48fps. There was a lot of whip panning when Radagast led the Orcs away over the rocky plains, but the 24fps was blurry in comparison.

I've never seen so many different responses to a new format - from hyper-real to hyper-fake , from nausea-inducing to 'it's the future!'

Just saw the flick for the second time.  I did 3D HFR this time.  I general didn't like it.  I'll explain why later on.  This needs some thought as I feel it affects a lot more then just the temporal.

Thanks for the thoughts - some great observations there.

Yes, the actual finding of the ring scene is totally different, and I'm surprised they didn't attempt to match it. There's no reason why Bilbo could not have crawled out of where he was hiding and found it on all fours like he did at he beginning of Fellowship. And not only was the scene different, it was played very casually in a long shot. I was expecting an overcranked close-up, with foreboding music - signifying 'THIS IS A BIG DEAL!'

The stone trolls seemed to match their position between the two movies.

But another continuity error that's now arisen is that Gandalf says to Bilbo at the beginning of Fellowship that he hasn't aged a day (the ring keeps him young) when there's a 40+ year difference between Ian Holm and Martin Freeman.

Yes, the rotunda gazebo was beautiful. How much?

And yes, the cave scenes were way overlit. We've established the moon isn't full. Nor is there any fluorescence. You would have only needed a 3 second insert to establish that. Is the bright lighting to  counter the 3D glasses... for those cinemas that can't calibrate their projectors properly?

Just to jump in and completely agree with Teague on the panning (and especially tilting). Those are the shots that don't work in HFR. I need to see it again to really nail down my thoughts on HFR, but I think it's clear that more thought needs to be paid to shots than even Jackson did here.

Galadriel can communicate with people telepathically. It's kind of her thing. And she was there, she just pulled a Batman when she left, for whatever reason.

I finally got a chance to see this last night. In 2D 24p. Nearest HFR showing is two hours from me and while I'm interested in experiencing that...  I'm not surcharges and also a tank of gas interested. Everybody's pretty much covered my feelings on it, overlong, self-indulgent, no stakes, too much slapstick humor, cartoony action sequences, etc. I even read this thread and many reviews before hand, so I was EXPECTING ridiculous, over-the-top action, and it still surprised me with how far it was willing to go. The finale of the Goblin mountain sequence was so absurd.

It suffered a flaw that I think many prequels do; it's designed too MUCH to be a prequel, rather than simply a story that's set earlier in the timeline. If you understand the distinction I'm making. The introduction into the world of Middle-Earth isn't as strong as in LotR. Aspects of fan-service moments like the "present" day stuff with older Bilbo are going to be relatively baffling to newcomers. I just think the way it's made is prohibitive of eventual saga viewings for people who have never experienced the series before.

That being said, there was a good deal to like about it. It was a beautiful experience, for a start. And it entertains on a scene-by-scene basis for the most part, even if the pacing is less than ideal. I thought Martin Freeman was fantastic, I was rooting for him to be cast long before The Hobbit was ever officially greenlit. This is the first time my personal pick for a role has actually been cast, and I'm so glad he didn't disappoint. James Nesbitt sort of stole the show, and Cate Blanchett is a beautiful ageless demon woman. And of course everything to do with the Riddles in the Dark sequence was fabulous.

The most nonsensical thing about the movie to me, though... Why the Hell was Azog CGI? I really just don't understand what that achieved that a big, buff, bald dude in prosthetics with a digital arm replacement wouldn't have. Get Jason Momoa or somebody in there. I might have forgiven it if he and his shiny skin weren't hands down the worst CG creature in the movie.

I thought Azog was great, and presented almost an inhuman monster in comparison to the rest of the Orcs. I might be wrong, but to me it made him more of a threat, because he lacked the almost Hausian (Harry Hausen reference) of the monsters were there is kind of a person behind them that might make us sympathetic towards them (I can think of moments in LOTR).
Azog is pure villian and I honestly never thought of him as a CG character. Not that Jason Momoa wouldn't have been amazing as a giant hulking white Orc-I agree that would have been cool. But, Azog worked for me because it made him more inhuman and threatening than the average Orc.