Available for viewing only in select cinemas in major cities (the rest will feature a standard 24-frame presentation), this “high-frame rate” Hobbitfeatures exceptionally sharp, plasticine images the likes of which we might never have seen on a movie screen before, but which do resemble what we see all the time on our HD television screens, whether it’s Sunday Night Football, Dancing With the Stars or a game of Grand Theft Auto. (Indeed, most TVs now have a menu setting that can, if you so desire, lend this look to everything you watch — a setting appropriately christened by some gearheads as the “soap opera effect.”) Whereas video-shot “films” have labored for years to approximate the look of celluloid, Jackson goes whole hog in the opposite direction, the idea being that this acute video quality comes closer to the way the human eye perceives reality. Fair enough, but the reality Jackson conjures isn’t quite the one he intends: Instead of feeling like we’ve been transported to Middle-Earth, it’s as if we’ve dropped in on Jackson’s New Zealand set, trapped in an endless “making of” documentary, waiting for the real movie to start.
For the record, I returned to see The Hobbit a second time, at 24 frames, and found it more aesthetically pleasing but no more dramatically engaging. At any speed, the movie only springs to full life late in the day, during the first meeting of Bilbo and the tragic creature who will come to be known as Gollum (once again played by the sublime Andy Serkis), a hobbit reduced to a quivering, schizophrenic mass by his fidelity to a certain gold ring. Suddenly, in one long scene consisting of nothing more than two characters trying to outwit each other in a game of riddles, Jackson the storyteller seems to overtake Jackson the technocrat. The old magic returns and, for a fleeting moment, The Hobbit feels truly necessary, a triumph of art over commerce.
Sounds like The Hobbit suffers from a lot of unnecessary padding, the better to profit threefold and not merely twice over. Ugh. Too bad we couldn't get someone to make it who loved Tolkien more than Jackson, who STILL doesn't seem that knowledgable as a Tolkien expert.
It would really be best to fact check before making a statement that paints Peter Jackson as egotistical. Guillermo Del Toro pulled out of the project of his own volition due to the delay in production in 2010, and it took a while for Peter Jackson to make the decision to direct The Hobbit himself.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/17/the-hobbit-peter-jackson-guillermo-del-toro_n_1975016.html
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