The Hobbit Trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2012-2014)

[Alan Smithee]

People don't like the length and they don't like 48 fps. Looks like a 3 film disaster, that's probably too big to fail.

[flyonthewall2983]

The fanbase alone should trudge it through, I would think.

[Alan Smithee]

Indeed. I'm saying at this level, it's hard to lose money. No one liked the new Star Wars trilogy but everyone just kept showing up for more punishment each year.

[flyonthewall2983]

I don't have a horse in this race at all, but I figure I'd post this which was written by a friend of mine.

[stroszeck]

No one liked the new Star Wars trilogy but everyone just kept showing up for more punishment each year.

And in 3D this year. They can crap out a mediocre franchise movie these days and it would still kill at the BO. Case in point Dark Knight Rises and Transformers 3. Audiences today don't seem to care anymore

[jbeall]

No one liked the new Star Wars trilogy but everyone just kept showing up for more punishment each year.

And in 3D this year. They can crap out a mediocre franchise movie these days and it would still kill at the BO. Case in point Dark Knight Rises and Transformers 3. Audiences today don't seem to care anymore

What choice do they have? (Please don't answer that.)

[Drucker]

No one liked the new Star Wars trilogy but everyone just kept showing up for more punishment each year.

And in 3D this year. They can crap out a mediocre franchise movie these days and it would still kill at the BO. Case in point Dark Knight Rises and Transformers 3. Audiences today don't seem to care anymore

Dark Knight Rises has a fanbase that's been built up after 2 really great films. There's reason for people to believe they'll like them and go. They surely weren't mindlessly flocking to John Carter or Cloud Atlas.

[Mr Sausage]

I remember liking The Hobbit when we had to read it in grade 6. I liked it so much I immediately picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and started to read it that very summer. I finally finished that book almost two years later while sitting out a school suspension in grade 8. I found it much easier to put down than pick up. It's like everything fun about The Hobbit was taken and then tripled in length to the point of becoming tedious. Wait, was I talking about Fellowship of the Ring of this new Hobbit adaptation?

Anyway, I would've gone to this if it were one movie. I might even have gone if it were two. But three is just too much.

[knives]

I'll just try to rewatch the Rankin-Bass film instead. I remember liking it. The Gene Deitch adaptation is pretty fun too and shows how wrong headed the length of Jackson's adaptation is.

[JonasEB]

Anyone have any opinion about the 48 frames per second issue?

Word is it looks like daytime soaps and morning news, which is what I was expecting. Not at all a good thing.

[MichaelB]

I saw a 60fps Showscan demo circa 1989 and was very impressed indeed, but it wasn't shot digitally and it wasn't in 3-D, which may be relevant here.

[JonasEB]

I have never seen film at 60 fps but I do know film and video react differently to slightly higher frame rates. I've seen some American and Canadian TV shows shot on film at 30fps and didn't find the look unappealing at all - smoother but maintaining the photographic quality you'd expect. It doesn't have the cheap look of video at that rate. 30 fps HD video on TV still resembles the look of SD video (of course, TV equipment and the Red One are somewhat different beasts.) I can only imagine it's simply amplified with another 18 frames.

I'm not terribly interested in The Hobbit but I am curious to see how this aspect of it turned out. It's odd that digital has made this venture more plausible yet its photographic drawbacks may have canceled out the potential benefits.

[wattsup32]

I read the article linked to above. If I was on the fence about seeing it before, I am definitely off the fence and will be in the theatre now all because of this quote from the article:

"When people run, they look like they are on the 'Benny Hill Show,'"

Awesome.

[Brian C]

I saw some 48fps test footage a few months ago, and to me it looked like the artificial motion enhancements you see on new HDTVs. I was wondering if the footage I was seeing was actually shot 48fps, or instead shot in a lower framerate and artificially sped up. It was just test footage, after all, and not an actual demo, so I figured that it might not be up to state-of-the-art standards.

Reading the Hobbit reviews, though, it sounds like it has the same problem that I saw in the test footage. But Jackson really shot 48fps, right? But there's no inherent reason that a higher framerate should produce artificial-looking motion, so now I'm wondering if Jackson didn't apply some other "enhancements" to the film besides just a higher framerate. Maybe he likes the HDTV "soap opera effect" and employed it for his movie?

[greggster59]

I saw some 48fps test footage a few months ago, and to me it looked like the artificial motion enhancements you see on new HDTVs.

Samsung HDTV's are set up like this out of the box. It's referred to as 'soap opera effect' and makes everything look like it was shot on video tape.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/12/help-k ... oks-weird/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[flyonthewall2983]

The HuffPo article stated not all theaters are showing it in that speed, is it ones that aren't equipped with digital projectors?

[CSM126]

Most theaters (including digital projection-equipped locations) are not capable of showing 48fps.

[krnash]

I don't have a horse in this race at all, but I figure I'd post this which was written by a friend of mine.

Your friend is a little misinformed, as are most people. Only the first two films are adapted from The Hobbit (hence the second being called The Desolation of Smaug, which is essentially the end event of the book), with the third film being a translation of some most interesting appendices Tolkien wrote to coincide with The Lord of the Rings. There's certainly enough material in those writings for their own movie. And furthermore, regarding two films being dedicated to The Hobbit, it's perfectly reasonable; the book is written far more vaguely that LOTR, with passages that just say things like 'The travelers wandered on and on through the forest, encountering all sorts of strange oddities, such as thingamajigs and whatnots...' (terrible paraphrasing). My point is that it's a book that skims but hints at a lot of expansion, which I'm sure Jackson will take advantage of here. Two films for the book and a third to cover other material doesn't seem so unreasonable at all to me.

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/22204/t ... appendices" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[cdnchris]

And furthermore, regarding two films being dedicated to The Hobbit, it's perfectly reasonable; the book is written far more vaguely that LOTR, with passages that just say things like 'The travelers wandered on and on through the forest..."

Yay! More walking!

"Even the fucking trees walked in those movies."

I didn't realize the third was based on the other writings by Tolkien, so that makes a bit more sense. It's nice to hear that the book is technically not being stretched out to three films. But at 166 minutes, the running time I came across for the first film, that alone really seems to be stretching it for one movie (from what I remember of the book) so I'm still having issues with it being stretched to two. So when my wife drags me to the first movie I'm going to be prepared for an ass-numbing experience. I actually really liked Fellowship and still do, but good God, the other ones were rather hard to sit through for some reason.

[Brian C]

And furthermore, regarding two films being dedicated to The Hobbit, it's perfectly reasonable; the book is written far more vaguely that LOTR, with passages that just say things like 'The travelers wandered on and on through the forest, encountering all sorts of strange oddities, such as thingamajigs and whatnots...' (terrible paraphrasing). My point is that it's a book that skims but hints at a lot of expansion, which I'm sure Jackson will take advantage of here.

If Tolkien didn't think it worthwhile to "expand" those episodes, I have a hard time believing that Peter Jackson can make it so. I don't mean to be a jerk here, but frankly I think this type of expansion is exactly what everyone is afraid of when they complain about the book being broken up into multiple movies.

[krnash]

And furthermore, regarding two films being dedicated to The Hobbit, it's perfectly reasonable; the book is written far more vaguely that LOTR, with passages that just say things like 'The travelers wandered on and on through the forest, encountering all sorts of strange oddities, such as thingamajigs and whatnots...' (terrible paraphrasing). My point is that it's a book that skims but hints at a lot of expansion, which I'm sure Jackson will take advantage of here.

If Tolkien didn't think it worthwhile to "expand" those episodes, I have a hard time believing that Peter Jackson can make it so. I don't mean to be a jerk here, but frankly I think this type of expansion is exactly what everyone is afraid of when they complain about the book being broken up into multiple movies.

Well actually he did think it worthwhile to expand, hence his countless appendices and revisions and histories written afterward. He wrote The Hobbit very early on, as a children's book, but later, as a more accomplished and practiced writer, delved very much deeper into Middle Earth with the intent of fleshing out intense details he didn't include before. I mean, the last fifty pages alone of the book contain a months-long war between every species in Middle Earth. Two movies might seem excessive to you, but a one movie adaptation would have been a disaster.

I guess I would ask the naysayers whether they had read the book recently, or at all, or whether they had just heard that the book was 300 pages and had decided that sounded like short material.

[knives]

As a more accomplished writer he wrote lesser books. The Hobbit is far more interesting than anything (with the possible exception of The Similarion) else that Tolkien wrote. That said brevity should be a key in making a suspenseful narrative film. In theory Jackson should be cutting material instead of adding it and since there is a fifteen minute adaptation of this story with all of the main points in it two films running over two hours is absurd. Without leaving out any events you could easily shorten the film to one two hour film. Right now it just seems like a money making scam on Jackson's part.

[zedz]

I've tended to defend the 'bloated' running times of The Lord of the Rings films, even though I'm not a great fan of them, because it really is a massive (and, yes, 'bloated') book. King Kong had no such defence available to it, and the extended running time stretched thin material past the point of distraction. (I mean, honestly, when you saw the original film were you really thinking, "what this really needs is more backstory for these fascinating human characters!")

5+ hours of The Hobbit definitely seems to fall on the King Kong end of the spectrum. Like Sausage, I read and enjoyed The Hobbit in primary school, and was persuaded to try The Lord of the Rings by schoolmates who acclaimed it as the most awesome thing ever (same guys, naturally, who were saying exactly the same thing about Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' a year or so later). I slogged through the first book and started on the second before abandoning it and going back to The Chrysalids for the third time. For me, the residual appeal of The Hobbit was always that it was not The Lord of the Rings, but something much simpler, pacier and breezier - so I fear that Jackson's approach is going to make it very heavy going for me!

[Mr Sausage]

The thing about quest stories like The Hobbit is that they can go on forever. A prominent critic called them "and then" stories because unlike causal narratives, which he called "and therefore" stories, incidents can just be added and added because the incidents on the way to completing the quest are mainly delaying tactics. They don't directly affect the quest itself, and are rarely ever directly related to it. So you can produce a 1500 page book out of a quest myth if you wanted. And writers often did.

As a scholar of old literatures, Tolkien knew this. But he also knew that modern audiences would become impatient at a story that long, so he left out a lot of superfluous incident. This wisdom clearly left him as he went on in his career, rewriting Beowulf and The Volsunga saga at ever greater length.

[knives]

Wasn't The Hobbit him rewriting Beowulf (from a different vantage point)? Where else did he do that?