This will be brief. Its 4 am. I have just finished my second viewing of the Hobbit, so I have now seen it in both 48fps and 24fps. The differences are miniscule, but my god I have begun to hate that movie.
Its like going to the beach and forgetting your towel so you have to borrow someone's. Sure most of the day was fun, you did some neat things, met new friends, but borrowing that person's towel got sand in your crotch and now you can't sleep. Its irritating, but its just a bunch of little pieces of sand and its driving you insane trying to find every last bit of it.
Let's step back a minute, and talk about tension. End of the day, if you can look over the small stuff then there's really just this one gaping flaw in Peter Jacksons prequels. The scenes don't hold tension long enough for payoff. Basic movie construction dictates that a scene is going to follow the pattern of slow tension build, fast tension build, release in various forms. Horror films tend to drag the slow tension and action films hit high tension fast. This is pretty basic editing and doesn't really involve a lot of efffort.
In the Hobbit, allllll the tension leaves during the rise. Few good examples. Radaghast is escaping from the Necromancer, being chased by evil bats. Its got some tension, building up a bit as the bats get closer. How will he escape? Well I don't know, they cut back to his face. All the tension gone. Same thing happens when he leads the Orcs away on his sled. Building tension as we try and see if he can escape or if he'll die. Orcs seem to be getting closer, then all of the sudden they find the Dwarves anyway and all the tension is relieved without any payoff. Again, Gollum discovers Bilbo took the ring. Tension has been building over 10 minutes or so. Suddenly Gollum attacks and what appears to be a frantic chase scene begins! How exciting! Then a hard cut to dwarves. Poof. No more tension.
The problem with the Hobbit is scenes like those; tension is built but because Bilbo is so sparsely connected with the action the tension is constantly dissolved either by internal contradictions or by poor editing. Otherwise those scenes would be exciting and cool since I actually like and care about the characters, to the point where I almost forgot nobody dies in the Hobbit so who cares?
Now, to tie this to a larger trend. See, big movies like this are getting very stupid. That's bad. Big movies have always been schlocky, but schlocky isn't just stupid. Its stupid and fun. There's still some tension, so there's payoff after release. The Hobbit is part of this weird trend in forgetting filmmaking 101. It can't construct an exciting scene for its life, just like how the Star Wars prequels can't do anything or Transformers can't find a tone. Big Movies seem to have these weird gradually lowering standards in film constrution to the point where I give high praise to movies who have actions which advance the plot. That's some basic shit right there.
Now to sleep. Short version;
Hollywood sucks still, the Hobbit is okay just too long and needs a better editor than a cardboard cutout that the real editor left behind while on his lunch.
Amen! Double Amen! I saw the Hobbit with my two teenage sons last week, and man, were were all three disappointed as hell. This wasn't the charming book I read to them every night when they were 8 and 10. This wasn't the book about a relationships and why being a hero is something that comes from your inner nature and the friends you forge, but rather about how many Orcs you can smash on the way to some great prize. The elements were there, but surrounded by lowest common denominator bloat.
Double amen to your comment too.
In addition to all of your observations: the tone for this movie has been set by Jackson's LotR films. So it has to be this epic action movie, with lots of swordplay and scary brutal monsters, and an overall 'gritty' tone.
So instead of cutesy little goblins being petty and irritating, they get upgraded to savage LotR Orcs. And there was that annoying sub-plot with The Great White Orc chasing the party down because fuck dwarves.
Right! I know! Goblins replaced by dripping, creeping, smelly, dingbat Orcs. Really, it was LOTR part 4. Or Part Zero, I guess, coming before the rest of it.
I really enjoyed the Hobbit but I think it helps if you go into it realizing that it's a children book and that Tolkien hated writing action. I mean, he knocks out the protagonist later so that he doesn't have to write an action scene. I wanted the Hobbit to be fun, and it was.
Not to talk too much about an unrelated topic, but the same pattern can be seen in popular music. A lot of it is garbage. It's rare to hear more than a few chords in a song. The lyrics repeat endlessly so that the tune it catchy and have many people singing it and sell many records. Sure, if you want to think "rationally" they're making a lot of money from what they supposedly love to do. But if that was truly what they loved doing, they wouldn't be putting out such shit that soils the airwaves.
I'm not though. There are too many plotlines which add nothing to the main story, and while a subplot or two is fine they REALLY need to be subdued. Stepping back from the books for a second, and taking the film as it is presented to us, the story is ultimately about Dwarves trying to retake a kingdom that was stolen from them by the dragon Smaug. That is the plot of the movie, and its not a terribly complicated plot so it should be easy to follow. Now, because this is not a schlocky action movie like the up and coming "Pacific Rim," action should all be in service of the plot, yes? As in, each action scene, and every scene in general, should either establish a character's personality or advance the story in some way. So what's the point of the Pale Orc? Let's examine his actions in the movie for a second. First he is in the battle scene where he cuts the head off of King Thrall, and then has his arm cut off by Thorin. That's fine; the scene establishes Thorin as a good leader and a good fighter. Excellent, great, point taken, moving on. Second thing he does is say that there's a price on the Dwarf's head. Okay....I mean I guess there could be payoff in the next two movies, but the only payoff in this movie is that it mildly delays the Goblin King from killing them then and there, right up until he sees the magic sword which negates the fact that there is a price on the Dwarf's head in the first place. Third, he attacks them at the cliff since apparently Wargs can cross mountains and discover the exact location of a small band of dwarves which spent days on small stone paths which are barely big enough for a creature who is smaller than a human, and would be uncrossable by wargs, in the matter of a few hours. This scene is important in understanding the problem with bringing in Orcs, because its the payoff from the other scenes. Thorin realizes he was wrong about the Pale Orc being dead and the Pale Orc says something that Thorin can't understand because he can't speak Orcish, and then they fight. Thorin is defeated because he decided to not have his archer just shoot the Orc in the head because that'd make sense and then Bilbo saves him. Then everyone attacks and the eagles save everyone. What happened here? Well, Thorin realized he was wrong about his supposedly dead enemy and came to accept Bilbo. He was also injured but suffered no long term consequences from it because of Gandalf, so unless the second movie immediately establishes the fact that he somehow has a crippling injury from being bitten by a Warg that will have been utterly pointless as a scene. The party is back on track anyway, so everything is back to status quo. Meaning that the ENTIRE SCENE, which lasts a good 15 minutes, is for Bilbo to save Thorin, and Jackson can give us a similar shot to the one at the end of Fellowship where Boromir gets shot with arrows a lot and falls to the ground in slow motion. So really the Orc as a plot device is an utterly pointless distraction, since all he does is make Thorin accept Bilbo, which could have been accomplished a thousand other ways that didn't have to take 15 minutes and have a super long action scene. If this is how the first movie plays out, then what about the next two? Because we won't forget about that subplot because the audience isn't stupid, and if they pull a Pirates 3 and the Pale Orc dies off camera it'd be worse. So they have to end up resolving the plot quickly because its dumb, but not so quickly that we notice it, AND they have to pad the running time so that we spend a total of seven and a half hours watching people take a small trip to a mountain in order to fight a dragon who is killed by some guy in a village who isn't Bilbo. Why is this movie called the Hobbit?
As long as people are going out to see these big budget movies, nothing is going to change. Sure, there will be the occasional oddball film a la Wes Anderson or another Tarantino film that will make a lot of money, but those are few and far between. It's all about the money and how to have the biggest profit margin.
The thing is, this movie looks fucking EXPENSIVE. So I don't know how much money they're actually making, as compared to say, Adam Sandler making shitty comedies with padded budgets. It doesn't strike me as a cynical cash grab, it strikes me as Peter Jackson liking action scenes and nobody questioning the guy who made the Lord of the Rings which made everyone a shitzillion dollars.
From the New York Times:
"...its budget — an estimated $400 million, including global marketing costs —...". So yes, this movie is fucking expensive, it will probably end up being one of the most expensive movies every made. It's also stated that the movie took in 84.1 million dollars in the United States alone during it's opening WEEKEND, and 223 million dollars worldwide.