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Ars: Final Hobbit Movie Is 'Soulless End' To 'Flawed' Trilogy
An anonymous reader writes: The final chapter to Peter Jackson's series of films based on The Hobbit debuted last week, and the reviews haven't been kind. Ars Technica just posted theirs, and it highlights all the problems with Battle of the Five Armies, a two-hour and twenty-four minute film based on only 72 pages of the book. Quoting: "The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches. ... There are other problems. Everyone in this movie takes themselves way too seriously, which makes them even harder to sympathize with. Peter Jackson leans way too hard on voice modulation to make characters seem menacing or powerful. The movie's tone is still way out of step with the book's tone. ... There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset — the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children's novel into three feature-length prequel films." Other review titles: "Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped," "The Phantom Menace of Middle Earth," and "Lots of Fighting, Not Much Hobbit."
Three stars in the Observer and four stars in the Guardian.
I'll still be going to watch it with friends between Christmas and the New Year.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
You'll get used to it, it's just cultural bias. HFR movies and other content viewed on HDTVs that do motion interpolation look like soap operas because for a long time, soap operas were shot with video cameras with a higher framerate, whereas any serious production was shot on film stock (and most such productions are still shot at 24fps). The result is the "soap opera effect", in that we still associate the technically superior framerate with cheap-ass productions.
With that said, the CGI was pretty pad in "the Hobbit" at times, and some scenes got padded to incredible length ("when is that barrel riding scene going to end?!"). One movie wouldn't have done justice to the story, but 3 was too much.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
There's only about 190 pages. It's actually quicker for the average reader to read the whole of the hobbit than to watch all 3 films.
Just some numbers. The average person reads at between 250 and 300 words per minute. Let's call it 275.
Hobbit is 95,356 words long. That's 347 minutes of reading.
The first two Hobbit movies combined are 330 minutes long.
So basically an average reader will plow through the book in the time it takes to watch two of the movies plus some trailers before the third. Forget the extra 144 minutes of the actual movie!
"Oh no... he found the
I hate the way my friends' HDTVs make movies look like soap operas. I hated the last Hobbit which I saw in HFR/HD and the "look" completely ruined the film for me. The lighting used stood out like a sore thumb from the live action characters vs. the CG, the movement of the CG itself was horrible in many scenes.
And this film was no different. Ugh.
Your experience is due to the TV settings. Most TV's out of the box have the "soap opera effect" set to maximum and the sharpness set to maximum. Brightness adjusts the black level and contrast adjusts the white level. These are all set to make it look good in the bright store but are generally not desirable for home movie viewing to a discerning viewer. Perhaps your friend is open to adjusting his picture - however be aware that a lot of people believe they like the super sharp picture because they are used to it and might dislike the softer, more natural picture. Ask him to try it for a couple of weeks before making a decision to go back.
This is the first thing I did on my Panasonic plasma TV (after the burn-in) was to turn that shit off and calibrate the display. The picture is incredible.