Indy Jones Fan

I really enjoyed getting to see Middle Earth again. I chose to see The Hobbit in regular, plain old 2D because that is how I know this world to look. I liked the movie but it didn't come close to how I felt when I left the theater after seeing Fellowship. Of course the obvious question has to be

johnnysd

See, I think the perfect platform is in the opposite direction. Not a big special effects movie but a smaller shot on location film. I think a movie like Dog Day Afternoon or Taking of Pelham 123 would be awesome in non-3d HFR.

I think much of the negative reaction is that it looks different, and different is bad. For me I have never seen a better looking movie even if a couple of sets did look like sets

whoopdido

A couple reasons:

whotony

He didn't say it, you took it that way.
Anyway I loved the HFR and hope to see more tha way.

For those who are complaining it doesn't look like film, what does that mean anyway? What does film look like.

I see a trend in movies that everything is filmed dark and with all teal and orange.

I thought it was a nice change to be able to see everything that was on the screen and not have everything hidden by shadows and darkness and soft focus.

whotony

Hs Tarantino been in here to say why he voted no stars

SuckaMC

I like to see motion blur in films, it gives objects a sense of motion and speed. If I watch a car zoom by in real life, the car would be clear and the trees, etc would be blurry. Or if I fixate on the tree, the car would zoom by in a blur. To take that away makes everything seem artificial.

Just my 2 cents..

hahn

Scanning through this thread, I see a lot of discussion about the 48 fps. I read some article last week (or heard maybe on NPR?) that talks about why a lot of people don't enjoy watching 48 fps. The effect has a name - it's called the "uncanny valley". Also, this article in Scientific American does a good job of explaining it.

If you don't want to read the links, the basics of it is that when we typically see something that's fake and looks fake, we're okay with it because what we see matches what we know. But when you see something you know is fake, but it starts to look real, your mind kind of flips out and rejects it. Thus, wax museum figures seem a little creepy sometimes. There's this discord between what you see and what you know to be true. Polar Express with Tom Hanks was one of these movies where the animation got a little too real and so a lot of viewers' perceptions were that the characters looked creepy.

How it applies in frame rates is that our eyes and brains are able to capture reality at 60 fps. However, we only perceive about 40 fps. Thus, when a movie is filmed at 24 fps, we interpolate information between those frames. We're comfortable doing this because we know the image we're looking at is just that - an image. When you get above 40 fps, to say 48 fps, it starts to resemble how we perceive reality. And so that's when the uncanny valley kicks in and as a lot of you seem to have experienced - you hated it.

bdshort

Is this a discussion about the movie, or 48fps vs 24? Maybe we need a different thread.

hahn

When Avatar came out, most of the posts were about the 3D and the special effects. There's only so much you can say about the story, especially when almost everyone has already read it.

whoopdido

Yeah The Hobbit isn't some multi layered story with a twist ending or anything. It's an incredibly simple story and this movie only showed the first third of it. There really isn't anything to discuss.

Xander

Not sure what you're referring to here. If memory serves, in the book Bilbo finds the ring on the ground pretty much just like he did in the movie. What's different?

IIRC, he's not mentioned too much in the Hobbit. He's much more of an appendix character. And maybe the Simarillion? I haven't slogged my way through that yet.

Why So Blu?

Probably the scene in Fellowship of the Ring where young Bilbo, played by Ian Holm, finds the ring by just randomly stumbling on it. It's during the intro part.

foofighters7

As someone who has watched thousands of movies, this statement is very odd to me.

Can you not honestly not see a huge difference?

There really can be no argument about the difference, it's a fact.

The 48FPS was a good idea in theory but it didn't play out the way people hoped for. The hyper reality was unsettling and made the production look cheap in the non-action sequences.

IF they could harness the 48fps for action sequences and used 24 for day to day life and blend it seamlessly then we could talk but otherwise I'm not interested in watching a soap opera look in a theater.

Dan

I think this is actually very easy for them to accomplish.
Everything would be filmed and projected at 48fps.
Scenes where 48fps doesn't "work" would just have every "even" frame deleted and replaced with a copy of the previous "odd" frame. This would be done in the master, not by the projector itself.

ie:
Original 48fps scene: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.
48fps to 24fps converted scene: 1, 1, 3, 3, 5, 5, etc.

Theoretically, the "24fps" scenes would then look the way people expect 24fps to look, and the 48fps scenes would benefit from the higher frame rate. That way, the projector doesn't have to switch between framerates throughout the film.

This isn't much different than how 120Hz and 240Hz TVs handle 24Hz content (when "Frame creation" is turned OFF, of course). They're still technically displaying content at 120 or 240 fps, but they're just repeating the frames, and in those cases, the content looks just fine (as it should)

That, or the filmmakers could put some extra effort into figuring out how to always make 48fps work for every shot, not unlike Digital and 3D.

whoopdido

Meh...you probably just need to relax about it. I've watched thousands of movies too and I couldn't care less if it looked different. It looked better to me and that's all I care about. You just sound like an old fart that doesn't like change. My guess is if you watched 10 movies in a row in 48 fps you'd just get used to it and would forget all about 24 fps. The only reason you think 24 fps is the "correct" way to view a movie is because that's the way it's been for who knows how long and that's all you know.

My guess is that most of you that were really bothered by it spent the entire movie thinking about it. Yeah, I found the first town scene to be a little "different" looking but it took me about 10 seconds to adjust and then just went with it. By the end of the movie, nothing seemed even remotely out of place because I wasn't thinking about it.

I'm sure plenty of people complained when sound was first introduced to movies and when color was first introduced. Times change.

B.A.

My brother saw it last night in 3D at our local Imax theater. It was his first experience in said theater.

He didn't care for the 3D.

RoboDad

This is exactly what I have been saying since the whole HFR subject came up earlier this year. Except for one thing, that is. I'm an old fart who has seen thousands of films, and I welcome change that improves on something that was known to be "broken" from the start.

As many of us have said (again and again), 24 fps was never chosen because of any special aesthetic appeal it held. It was purely for pragmatic reasons - it was the least costly for theater operators to adapt to. Creating an emotional attachment to such a "standard" seems illogical to me.

I would even go further, and say that people who are so vocal in their dislike of HFR most likely spent the entire time actively looking for things to complain about.

And widescreen, and stereo sound, and surround sound. The key is that the technology of filmmaking is continuously evolving. What matters is how well filmmakers learn to use the technology.

Some early films from each new technological epoch were less than ideal in their use of new capabilities. Pioneers may not always "get it perfect" on the first try, and others seek to exploit the novelty factor, rather than using the tech to enhance the storytelling art. But that has never been a reason to abandon such advancements in such a knee-jerk way.

foofighters7

Bilbo didn't see it fall out and pick it up.

Basically the ring finds him in the book. It's dark and he just happens across it. Now in the movie it's playing to the 'thief' persona but it's not as it happened in the book. In the Fellowship what it shows is truer to the book.

The Ring abandons Gollum. It doesn't know it would be picked up by a Hobbit but rather probably hoping for a Goblin.

How Tolkien wrote it was best. Didn't need changed.

foofighters7

There is no correct way of showing a film. Filmmakers can choose to do what they want with the medium BUT it doesn't mean it's a good thing.

I think you are certainly in the minority and I don't see you getting your way on this one because most film fans won't have it.

This may not be the last 48fps film but I would guess most won't want to see it once they actually understand what the issue is.

Strevlac

It's hard to describe how incredibly sad it is to see some people calling this the best-looking movie ever made. It actually makes me queasy to read comments like that. It's an incredible insult to a multitude of talented artists of the past century of filmmaking.

If you are one of "those people," please, please go watch Citizen Kane, Summertime, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Lawrence of Arabia, Ryan's Daughter, The Conformist, Fellini Satyricon, Dr. Zhivago, or any of the other hundreds of visual masterpieces that have been made before spouting off.

whotony

Yeah, it's just awful. How dare people have an opinion different from someone else.

dvdjunkie32

Saw it in 2d, liked it, but can't say I loved it. My review in a nutshell:

Liked:

1. Returning to Middle Earth, seeing Frodo and Bilbo again.
2. The Dwarf city intro was outstanding, great art design.
3. Gollum scenes were great and well done.


Didn't Like:

1. Too much damn CGI. WTF Peter? In the original trilogy, you took a lot of care to combine minatures, realistic costumes and prostetics with CGI in wide shots. Now, every orc and goblin was CGI in a fully CGI environment. It ruined the movie for me.


2. Too much goofiness and attempts for humor. I knew I was going into a much lighthearted tale, but it was severely lacking the dark tone that I felt in the trailers. More of a kiddie movie.


3. Took forever to get any kind of action going. I dozed off a few times.

whoopdido

I don't know what to say to a person that actually wants to compare the visuals of The Hobbit to Citizen Kane. Should we compare a telephone to a sock next?

GreenMonkey

Yeah, I liked Fellowship's take on it just fine. Seeing Gollum drag off a goblin and drop the ring wasn't as good as the original (stumbling into Gollum randomly in the dark, while finding the ring on the floor by feel).

Strevlac

How about a Monet to a velvet Elvis?

Would you agree that if one is going to claim "best-looking ever made" then that person should at least have a frame of reference?