RocShemp

I think people are just used to the less obvious braids of Gimli's beard. At first glance they're not particularly noticeable.

B.A.

His were more subtle.

Josh-da-man

I think the idea behind Kili and Fili not having prosthetic noses and appearing more human-like is because they are younger than the others. As dwarves age, their noses and ears get larger.

As for all of the braids and hair, I think part of that is so that each dwarf had his own unique look. With thirteen of them in the company, it would be difficult to tell them apart if they all looked like Gimli.

raven56706

Saw it in imax 3d and it was awesome...but the star trek preview combined with man of steel preview had people in aweee

RocShemp

That's a good theory. But aren't they a fair bit younger than Thorin?

As seen in these pics they left Richard Armitage's (admittedly large) schnoz untouched as well. I get that they wanted him to look more heroic but I did expect a more bulbous nose for Thorin.

Josh-da-man

I can sort or remember it being implied in the movie that Thorin wasyoung, and he certainly looks younger than the other dwarves, save Fili and Kili, but according to sources I've read, he was the oldest Dwarf of the thirteen; even older than Balin. PJ playing loose with the established mythology?

SmackDaddy

Finally caught this in HFR 3D. HFR didn't bother me at all, in fact, I quite enjoyed it. Nice to not have the "stuttering" on fast sweeping shots. The 3D, howver, added nothing.

Enjoyed to film quite a bit. After reading a ton of reviews and impressions I guess maybe I was more engaged in the film then a lot of others as the pacing seemed fine. Sure, some things could have been trimmed a bit (goblin fight seemed a little on the long side) but it never really dragged for me.

B.A.

Good point.

Why So Blu?

Probably. You need a heroic looking protagonist to follow on the journey. If he looked like a typical dwarve, audiences would not care. Armitage also has a great speaking voice.

Dan

I don't think I posted my thoughts after seeing The Hobbit in 24fps.
I preferred HFR for almost the entire film. Further, the shots that I thought looked "too quick" in HFR (close-ups of hands moving, grabbing objects, closing boxes, etc.) also looked oddly quick in 24fps... so if I had to choose one or the other, I'd go with HFR.

I'm hoping to get another HFR screening in before it disappears from theatres here, but I don't know if that'll happen.

I really, really wish there was a 2D HFR option.

More importantly, though... the movie itself is good, but I just wasn't as impressed with the story/acting as I was with LOTR. As others have said, this may hold up better after seeing the sequels and thus seeing how the three films fit together. On its own, I felt like it was a bit too long (cutting 20 to 30 minutes would have been ideal), and unfocused. That said, some of the effects were truly amazing (ie: the trolls), and I'm going to go see the sequels without hesitation. If anything, I think all three films should have been released closer together (6 months apart, not 12).

Hiro11

story

Felt bad for the dwarf who can't hear well and had to have the horn to hear better get it smashed by the goblins. Wonder how that might play out in the other movies.

Solid Snake

Probably some humor in it but nothing big. I dunno if that happened in the book.

superdeluxe

I think many of the first reviews/complaints might have lowered my expectations, but I really liked it, I didn't really care that much for the slapstick stuff, they were okay. Never felt the movie dragged.

Loved Martin freeman as bilbo, a natural. Loved all the little touches from LOTR

TheMadMonk

Well, there is a connection to dwarfs there, with the whole Stonehenge bit.

Timber

The Hobbit : An Unexpected Stroll Across the New Zealand Countryside?

Saw it tonight in HFR 3D and I'm really not sure how I felt about it. I despise 3D and this did nothing to change that. It just looked fake and the HFR looked like it was just moving too fast to me. It got better the more I got used to it but the battle scenes I just couldn't figure out what was going on.

Overall I thought there were some really cool scenes but at the end I was left wondering why nothing really went on for more than 3 hours.

And why wasn't there an HFR 2D option? I think that would have gone over a lot better with me.

Jay G.

Saw it today in HFR 3D. I did find the HFR distracting at first. Also, some shots had the "too fast" motion others have noted, but for the most part the motion was at the right speed, just more fluid. It's interesting that SomethingMore noted the same speed issues in 24fps. I wondered if the shots were maybe ones accidentally shot in 24fps but processed as 48fps in post-production. Or maybe it's a problem with the projector firmware on some models (it seems similar to how sometimes video players play fast to "catch up" after a buffering issue). Or maybe they sped up some shots to improve the pace, and we're just noticing them because we're initially hyper aware of a difference in the filming method.

It did take me a while to get used to the HFR, and it was a bit offputting initially. It seemed like someone had gone into Middle Earth with one of the Planet Earth HD cameras. It looked great, but almost too real at first. I do think they managed the makeup and CGI to handle the extra detail well, nothing stood out as particularly fake.

The 3D was relatively unobtrusive. Some of the trailers before the film had me cringing at how some films use 3D, and this avoided most of those pitfalls. It was impressive to see them integrate the different heights of the characters with the 3D, since they had to avoid certain tricks they used to be able to use with 2D.


As for the story, it did seem a bit long, but I was never looking at my watch. As the first film in the trilogy, it had a lot to set up, especially with the extra LOTR stuff. The initial backstory of Dale I found to be a little heavy-handed with the exposition, giving a great many names and events over a short period of time. I found the FOTR prologue better handled. It didn't help that I was still getting used to HFR at this point.

I found it interesting that the orc chief Azog was expanded on in this film to serve as the main villain, but didn't die by the end. To me, it seemed like he served a similar role as Uruk-hai Lurtz in FOTR. I expect that when the series was originally just two films, Azog died at the end of the first film. Now that it's split into three, it seems odd that he doesn't die in the encounter at the end of the film.

Solid Snake

The film was shot in 48 FPS. I don't think there was any bit of it shot in 24 FPS. Going from 48 to 24 is easy. You can't make 24 into 48, if you get my point.

Jay G.

You can change 24 into 48, it's just that the action would play back twice as fast as the speed it had been recorded at, which is what it seemed like in certain shots.

Again, I was speculating on possible reasons why certain shots had faster-than-normal action in them. I don't think it's a result of shooting in 48fps (which shouldn't change the speed of the action, as long as it's played back at 48fps), since the action in the vast majority of the film was fine, so I was guessing as to what may be up with those specific shots or moments.

RichC2

24 to 48 would be like motion compensation on 120/240hz TVs where non-existent frames are added back in to the material, giving it an unnatural look.

MoviePage

They can achieve that age naturally, but they wouldn't retain their more youthful appearance as Bilbo did. Gandalf makes several references to this in FOTR ("You haven't aged a day!" etc.). The ring is doing the same thing to Bilbo as it did to Smeagol and the Ringwraiths before him -- unnaturally prolonging his life. The eventual result would have been becoming a wraith, completely invisible in the normal world. The line "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread" is lifted directly from Tolkien and quoted for purpose in the film.

Jay G.

It depends on how the conversion was done. I agree that your method is what would be needed if one wanted to convert 24 to 48 while retaining the correct speed of the action shot. However, since the shots in question looked faster than normal, it seems like the footage may be 24fps material simply shown twice as fast as normal (48fps).

Honestly, it's not like the concept of undercranking is new. Think Benny Hill.

Another possibility for how this occurred entered my head: the camera's firmware may have had a bug where it shot certain footage at 24fps, but reported it as being 48fps. So when they imported the footage into the editing program, it was imported at the wrong framerate.

RoboDad

Since I saw no evidence of the "sped up" effect when I saw the movie in HFR, I think it is safe to assume that there was no "bug" in the firmware. Besides, I would imagine that such a bug would have been noticed by more than a few people, long before a major motion picture made it all the way to the theater.

Even if The Hobbit had been the first HFR use of the RED Epic (it was not), when the filmmakers scanned the dailies, or later during editing, color timing, or foley/ADR/soundtrack recording they would surely have noticed the problem and addressed it with the folks at RED. No frame goes unscrutinized during the various stages of post-production.

I suspect what may be the problem is the lack of motion blur in some of the very fast-moving shots, which might be "playing tricks" on some segment of the population but not others. Maybe the lack of blur is causing some people to perceive the movement as actually being faster than it was.

RoboDad

I also want to add a few more data points on the HFR appeal debate. My son, his wife, and several of their friends went to the HFR showing over the weekend, and all but one loved it (they had all seen the movie in 24fps 3D already). And the one who didn't "love" it was merely unimpressed, claiming to see no difference between HFR and 24fps.

Dan

I think that's exactly it. In both the 24fps and HFR versions, I personally found that certain "inserts" (like hand movements) were the worst for this effect. If a hand moves across the screen and puts down a book in the span of less than 2 seconds, a true 24fps source would have significant motion blur. But since the source is 48fps, the motion blur is not as evident, so when converted down to 24fps, the clarity is there and the hand movement appears jittered as it jumps frame-to-frame as it moves. That could give the illusion that it's moving faster than it should.

Maybe.