The Hobbit In Review

Before I begin, I need to tell some stories about my life. It'll seem off topic at first, but they help me put what I noticed about The Hobbit in perspective. When I was 16, and learning to drive a car for the first time, my mother and I were driving on the highway for the first time: my first time driving over 40 mph. At one point, she had me turn right into what turned out to be a dead end (why there was a dead end so close to a traffic light on the highway, I'll never know). She claims she thought it was complete when she originally told me to turn that way, but I digress. The point is that we were sitting at a light, just watching for the light to turn so that we could re-enter the road. As we were watching, however, a truck took that very same turn way too fast. It rolled, scraping the side of the truck after landing in a magnificent crash, only coming to a stop after landing across 3 lanes of traffic. After watching this scene, it took me around 30 seconds to fully internalize the excitement of what I had witnessed, and realize that something abnormal had just happened.

The reason I say this is because when watching The Hobbit, I remember feeling that same feeling I felt in those two situations. I could tell I was watching an epic Orc battle, or an epic rock-flinging fight between Stone Giants, but when watching it in 48 fps it felt so real that until after they happened, just like the truck tipping in my real life, I had no real concept of how epic these scenes were. But there was something more life-like to how the images on the screen were moving. It was jarring, and I can see why people would mistake that feeling for things looking fake. But they don't. They look so real that you're forced to react to them differently, and I don't think that's a bad thing.

First off, HFR didn't make the costumes look any faker, nor did it make is possible to see Gandalf's contact lenses (I specifically looked at his eyes trying to see this because of that claim, and never noticed a thing). While it didn't make anything look faker, however, it did make them look anachronistic. Because the motion of the images was so lifelike, you feel like they should be following the rules of reality when they're far from doing so. Nobody seriously dresses like the Wizard Gandalf, and nobody has a kingdom of dwarves. But what you're seeing on the screen is what they would really look like if they did exist. You're being transported to middle earth, and it will take a little while (a few movies) for us to accept that such transportation is possible.

What HFR didn't do was make the CGI look fake. You have no idea how scary real Gollum, the Great Goblin, or the white Orc Azog look in 4K HFR 3D unless you go and see it yourself. Is there room for improvement? Of course. But it's not the jarring experience people are reporting. The thing is, with the exception of Gollum (whose scene critics are raving about), these CGI events were all war driven. But, this is one case where I theorize the lack of blur was actually a legitimately bad thing. Blur ads confusion to the scene as you're unable to completely make out what's happening. And that confusion makes the scene more terrifying, and therefore more exciting. In 48 fps, much of that sense of confusion was gone. It's possible that I'm extrapolating here from that same sense of reality disconnect from excitement that I was talking about from two paragraphs ago. But I have no idea how to experiment with a control against that, so I thought I'd just put that out there as another way HFR may have been affecting the scene.

The sense of speed-up that I was talking about before happened to me, but it also subsided no later than 30 minutes in. It wasn't a huge deal (and I'm sure I'll get used to it so it never happens if I see enough 48 fps viewings). There were others in my viewing group for whom the footage never slowed down, though. There were also some for whom it never once presented that problem. So it's impossible for me to predict how you will react to it.

But all in all, I think this is probably a very positive move. The movie felt so real! As James Cameron put it, "When you author and project a movie at 48 or 60, it becomes a different movie. The 3D shows you a window into reality; the higher frame rate takes the glass out of the window. In fact, it is just reality. It is really stunning," The glass he's referring to is that sense of separation, or the idea that you aren't really there. And that's completely true, and utterly amazing.

A lot of people would suggest that you see The Hobbit in 24 fps first and then see it in 48 fps so you can just see the new technology. I don't agree. I think you should just see the 48 fps, but only if you're looking to be completely immersed in middle earth. If you just want to experience the story without feeling what it would have been like to be there, I suggest finding a showing that's not labeled HFR. But I really hope the BluRay has an HFR copy for my own personal viewings.

Regarding the 3D, it's really good 3D, though not perfect (there were one or two instances of ghosting that I noticed, especially around subtitles and once when Bilbo stuck his sword out too far). It was used primarily as a means of bringing you into the world of The Hobbit. That's certainly not a bad thing, and the 3D is very easy on your eyes (backing up Peter Jackson's claims that 48 fps will improve the viewability of 3D). I do suggest seeing this film in 3D. While it doesn't reveal new meaning to the film, it adds a quality to the image that is very beautiful. 

The story itself is the same story from J.R.R. Tolkein's book. Jackson doesn't embellish much, often taking prose directly from the book and inserting it directly into the lines of the film. I hope I'm not insulting him if I say this is the nerdiest adaption of The Hobbit that there possibly could have been. What I mean by that is that he took samples from the Lord of the Rings footnotes and inserted them into the movie in places that they weren't in The Hobbit originally. It's still a faithful adaption, but it makes the film come across so much more prequel-ish than I was expecting. It also feels like it's telling the Hobbit more from Gandalf's perspective, with all the allusions to the events that would unfold in The Lord of the Rings that Tokein's appendixes describe to account for Gandalf's frequent absences from the Dwarves. The only complaint I have about their inclusion is that they clash with the intro showing the story being written from Bilbo's perspective. But I found them to be interesting and things that helped me get absorbed in the story a similar way to how HFR got be absorbed in the visuals. But it does take a certain kind of nerd to get that involved in a fantasy world, so I can understand it not appealing to everyone. I loved every minute of it.