It was quite good

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It was quite good - 30/1/2013 10:12:42 AM

chris wootton

Posts: 385
Joined: 15/9/2006

There's no way it should be three movies though.. they really dragged the story out I thought. Not sure I can be arsed with another 6 hours

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Post #: 241

RE: It was quite good - 31/1/2013 9:27:32 AM

MuckyMuckMan

Posts: 2327
Joined: 1/10/2005

Oh dear, what has Peter Jackson done? We went to see it last night and I really wish I hadn't. The whole look of the film was like a bad TV movie you'd get on the SyFi channel. By filming in 48fps, the film lost its heart and soul. There were occasions however that it looked great (the eagle rescue scene and gollum scene in particular) where it actually looked like a different film to the rest of the movie, scenes that had a bit of life and soul as opposed to what the rest of the film looked like it.

It just seemed to me as if they didn't have the same budget for this film. Why make 95% of the Orcs in cheap looking CGI when it worked perfectly fine with prosthetics in LOTR's?
I also thought the acting was not on a par with the acting in LOTR's, it just seemed very hammy (much more so than Gimli). And the dialogue spoken was terrible too.

All in all, I can't say I enjoyed it. There are far better fantasy films out there and it certainly won't sit comfortably with LOTR when the Tolkien marathons begin.

Sorry Peter Jackson but we won't be spending our hard earned cash in the cinema on Parts 2 & 3.

2/5

< Message edited by MuckyMuckMan -- 31/1/2013 7:20:21 PM >

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Last 5 films seen
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(in reply to chris wootton)

Post #: 242

RE: It was quite good - 31/1/2013 3:00:14 PM

chris wootton

Posts: 385
Joined: 15/9/2006

ACtually I'd agree with you on the acting.. Richard Armitage and Ken Stott were good, as was Freeman (although I thought he got quite lost through most of the movie).. the rest of the Dwarves though were pretty shit. James Nesbitt was basically James Nesbitt with eyeliner and it did make me laugh the way the best looking blokes weren't given any prosthetics at all. The problem with the Hobbit as a story is that apart from the names the dwarves aren't fleshed out as individual characters so you're not engaged with them at all.

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Post #: 243

RE: 24 FPS!!!! - 8/2/2013 3:40:35 AM

Lisamoviegeek

Posts: 25
Joined: 2/1/2013

quote:

ORIGINAL: BelovedAunt

quote:

ORIGINAL: Lisamoviegeek

I didn't watch Lord of the Rings, so I had no idea what to expect. It was long, but quite exciting. I had to go to the bathroom at some point when they were in the elves' valley. My friend joined me and when we came back they were fighting against some stone giants and Gandalf was gone in the next scene. I assumed he died, but then he turned up against when they were inside the mountains. What happened to him? Did he fall off the cliff, but still survived somehow?

Elrond, Galadriel, Saruman and Gandalf were having a big long, boring conversation so the dwarves just left arranging to meet Gandalf at the mountain later.

Haha, really?

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Post #: 244

BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!! - 22/2/2013 5:27:12 PM

Ciaran McDaid

Posts: 51
Joined: 16/10/2011

Can't wait for part 2

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Post #: 245

- 8/4/2013 1:15:29 PM

pulp_frankenstein

Posts: 13
Joined: 5/4/2013
From: ashford

freeman and the cast were perfect but again serkis stole the show

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Post #: 246

A superb return! - 8/4/2013 10:11:32 PM

dannyfletch

Posts: 586
Joined: 25/5/2008
From: Bromley

I love this movie and think Jackson is perfect for middle earth. I love the way he's turned it into an epic, it was 3 hours that happily flew by for me. A superb and very welcome return to middle earth!

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Post #: 247

RE: A superb return! - 12/4/2013 10:48:23 PM

superdan

Posts: 7335
Joined: 31/7/2008

Finally got around to watching it, and... yeah... I didn't really enjoy it. Didn't like it much at all, actually. There's so much fat on this movie that it just feels like a confused, bloated mess. The frequently lousy dialogue, uninteresting characters, bad guys that make Bond villains seem fully-fleshed and weird CGI (some of the work on Ian Holm made him look like a waxwork) were massively frustrating. Besides which, there is so much in this movie that we've already seen in LotR (but done far better in those movies) that it often feels like a lazy re-tread or greatest hits.

I seriously doubt I'll bother watching the last 6 hours of this 'trilogy'. All the first instalment has done is make me wish more than anything that del Toro had kept the reins.

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Post #: 248

Not for the faithful? - 15/4/2013 4:46:36 PM

HelenOLC

Posts: 2
Joined: 5/5/2010

I enjoyed The Hobbit up to a point - the dwarves were comical and 'tea at 4' well rendered. Andy Serkis as Gollum and Martyn Freeman as Bilbo were both excellant. But what happened to the Trolls' dialogue? That bore no resemblance to Tolkien! Great shame as it was always one of our favourite parts of the book and the dialogue in LOTR films bore very close resemblance to the written (even where rejigged to other places/characters). Could have done without Radagast too.

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Post #: 249

Not for the faithful? - 15/4/2013 4:46:38 PM

HelenOLC

Posts: 2
Joined: 5/5/2010

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Post #: 250

What a shameful star count... - 21/4/2013 12:29:01 AM

YouWillBeUnprepared

Posts: 61
Joined: 20/2/2012

Empire... Empire... EMPIRE!!!
One of the most greatest things about this magazine, and it's something that I as a film watcher and reviewer value, is your up-most honesty. There will always be film and hopefully, Empire's faith in film to deliver some of the witty, thought provoking, but faithful and honest reviews. And as a reader and fan, I have enjoyed reading, and disagreeing, with some of the words printed in those pages. But; a dark cloud has moved over me... Suddenly, the pages were flushed out by a dark shadow. What could this be? The most disgraceful star-count of a film review since your Blu-Ray review of Sucker Punch; The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey - FOUR out of FIVE?!?

As an Empire reader, I am ashamed to see these four, black stars taint the true quality of such a film as opposed to the new trilogy's follow-ups, all five, beautiful red star films. Hopefully, Empire will be a little more awake for the next installment?

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Post #: 251

RE: What a shameful star count... - 23/4/2013 2:51:50 PM

jackflaps

Posts: 9
Joined: 18/2/2008

I think part of the problem with the 'fake looking' CGI people have mentioned is to do with framerates.

Your normal CG_-heavy film runs at 24fps, which is the baseline framerate for all the computer animators to work to. Even then, that doesn't always happen. Anyone who's looked closely at Transformers: ROTF can tell that a lot of the CGI was animated at a sub-24 framerate. You only have to look at some of the Skids and Mudflaps scenes to witness the sort of jerky motion reminiscent of stop-motion era flicks. A common trick in such cases is to animate a CGI scene at a lesser framerate, then stick a load of motion blue on afterwards to try and paper the cracks. You tend to see this a lot in CGI-heavy films produced on a short schedule. Hence why the Transformers films, and many others, are such a mess of blurry, weird-looking CGI.

With the Hobbit, the problem is made even worse by the fact that the stock footage is going at double the framerate, meaning the CGI also has to be animated at double the framerate. Motion capture can cover for some of this (which is no doubt why PJ was so insistent on using it for so many of the CG elements), but the majority of the CG work still has to be done by good old-fashioned key-frame animation. Doubling the framerate essentially doubles the workload, which essentially means you either need twice the animation staff, twice the production time, or you need to start using some serious shortcuts. A lot of the CG elements in The Hobbit seem to have that same blurry quality as stuff like Transformers, which I would assume is due to the CG staff trying to cover the fact that they simply couldn't animate all the CG elements at true 48fps, and therefore had to try and bluff a lot of it. Radagast's rabbits, for instance, look awful, as do the wargs.

This then gets coupled with the usual CGI problems of having physics that aren't quite right, textures that don't look quite right, and that general sense of flatness and intangibility which is hard to get to shake, to result in CGI that just looks weird and not all that convincing.

This is just my suspicions, and I thought I'd bring it up seeing as how many people seem to have mentioned the CGI as something that was frequently 'off' regarding the film.

(in reply to YouWillBeUnprepared)

Post #: 252

RE: What a shameful star count... - 23/4/2013 4:31:11 PM

elab49

Posts: 52033
Joined: 1/10/2005

I read a fascinating article way back when about the way the brain processes things and the filmmakers had misunderstood something about 48fps and it's just we don't really work with it.

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Post #: 253