• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

The Hobbit - Official Thread of Officially In Production

Status
Not open for further replies.
S

ScreenSplitter

Member
Randdalf said:
Was fun, and kind of difficult too.
Click to expand...

Was so fun and replayable. Superior to the PS2 version in that you could play as Frodo and Gandalf, and every single campaign was different, more or less. The Eowyn campaign was hard as balls though. You got to play the part between Gandalf Grey -> White, and that was pretty cool.

Can't wait for Lego LotR at Christmas and the inevitable Lego Hobbit game a few years down the pipe.
 
A

Altazor

Member
TheJollyCorner said:
Anyone remember this gem?

242px-LOTRSNES.jpg


Lord_of_the_Rings_SNES.png


6066061720_9e85421862.jpg



Piece of shit.
Either that or I just sucked at it. Could be a combination of both.
Click to expand...

had a bitchin' Shire theme, though.
 
D

Darryl

Banned
Wilbury said:
Just watched the EE of FOTR for the first time in years on Blu Ray. Still a stupendous movie. My little brother was watching it for the first time as well and loved it.
Click to expand...

I watched the full extended edition for the first time just last year (before that I had only seen the first two movies when I was young) and I was really surprised how little the films have aged. I swear you could release them in theaters today and no one would notice.
 
A

Ape Gone Insane

Member
Well reviews should be coming out in 2 hours I believe? I'll be sleeping at that time so I'll check them tomorrow.

Found these non-spoiler Twitter impressions in the meantime from one person:

  • The Hobbit's biggest sin is being simply pretty good. Entertaining but rarely enthralling.
  • First half is kind of a disaster. Pleasant, but shaggy and meandering. Second half is action-packed and saves the movie.
  • More non-spoilery thoughts: The best scene isn't in the books and hasn't been spoiled by the trailers yet. Feels like pure Guillermo. [hmmm, interesting]
  • Thorin, Bombur, Fili and Kili all make strong impressions. The rest of the Dwarves are fairly interchangeable. Radagast is kind of awesome.
  • Some wonky CGI derails a couple of important scenes. Nutsack Goblin is the biggest offender.
  • But on the whole, it's a lot of fun. Not a masterpiece by any stretch, but not the trainwreck some of us were dreading.
  • Freeman's solid. Frequently funny. Feels like he's doing a Holm impression early on, but quickly finds his own rhythm.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
Slate Twitter:

"The Hobbit's biggest sin is being simply pretty good. Entertaining but rarely enthralling."

"First half is kind of a disaster. Pleasant, but shaggy and meandering. Second half is action-packed and saves the movie."

James Rocchi's Twitter:

"Also, are there any female characters in the book? Because right now, THE HOBBIT makes THE AVENGERS look like THE WOMEN. #1939thankyou"

Brian Duffield's Twitter:

"HOBBIT is also way less emotional than LOTR. No real tear-filled moments. A lighter time all around."

"If the Hobbit didn't add Galadriel, there would have been NO speaking roles for women."
Click to expand...

Round ups are coming in.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/hobbit-first-reactions
 
K

Kud Dukan

Member
Scullibundo said:
Round ups are coming in.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/hobbit-first-reactions
Click to expand...

Should note that Brian Duffield added a comment to that story:
I had a lot more positive things to say too, as well as commenting how only THE HOBBIT has any women in creative roles of this year's blockbuster crop.
Click to expand...

Feels like the author of that link went out and picked some negative quotes from Twitter to match what the author felt, because you could easily have picked out a dozen very positive quotes as well.

To be clear, I'm not trying to push back against the negative reviews, I'm just saying that the reaction online (from what I've seen) has been more positive than that story suggests. We'll see in a few hours either way.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
Branduil said:
Oh boy the "where are the women!!!?" complaints are going to be popular, aren't they.
Click to expand...

Yeah. This just reminds me how the makers of Ender's Game have changed a main character into a woman and completely missed the point of that environment. PC brigades give me the shits sometimes.
 
B

Branduil

Member
Peter Jackson should just play the "well Dwarf women have beards so you can't say for sure that none of the 13 are women" card.
 
D

Demoncarnotaur

Member
I'm glad Jackson ended up doing these, but man I would also have killed to see Guillermo's vision.. at the very least I wish he stayed on the project in some form.

Koodo said:
Wonky CGI?

That's actually shocking.
Click to expand...

Eh, the CG has been throwing me off a lot in the recent trailers, clips and tv spots. Its not bad, but its not great, IMO at least.
 
E

Edmond Dantès

Dantès the White
No speaking roles for women in Lawrence of Arabia either and I've never seen anyone complain about that aspect of El Aurens.

Banners done, videos consolidated, time for sleep.
 
G

Gozer the Gozerian

Member
Demoncarnotaur said:
I'm glad Jackson ended up doing these, but man I would also have killed to see Guillermo's vision.. at the very least I wish he stayed on the project in some form.
Click to expand...

Yeah in all seriousness I'm sure I'll love Jackson's Hobbit, and I suppose something can be said about it being pretty cohesive with his LotR trilogy. It's just that I've already seen his version of Middle Earth and I would've loved to see Del Toro's fresh take on it.

I really, really, hope all the concept work from Guillermo's time on the project gets released at some point, only then will I be at peace.
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
I wish I had a good way of figuring out if this was playing in 48fps in more theaters here. The only theater listed on that 48fps site is a chain so it stands to reason that one of the other, nicer ones in the same chain would be showing it but the theaters never know what I'm talking about when I call. I just want to know if my IMAX will have it in 48fps.
 
A

AgentOtaku

Member
Discotheque said:
I love the LOTR films and many considered those to be bloated and unfocused. If it's anything like that and less like King Kong then I have no doubts I will enjoy this immensely.
Click to expand...

When I rewatched Two Towers EE last year, I was shocked at how meandering that flick is from when I'd seen it last.
All the extended human stuff in the middle REALLY drags

FotR is still my fav

Was debating on rereading The Hobbit real quick like just for kicks ...haven't since I was in high school
 
A

Adam J.

Member
My brother works at a theater, and he said today that they were getting Hobbit in HFR 3D, even though it isn't listed anywhere online. Hopefully this is the case for more theaters.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
Collider's Review

A note on 48fps: I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 48fps and 3D in a Warner Bros. studio screening room, so my review can only speak to that experience as a reference. (I’d like to see the film in 2D at 24fps and 48fps to see how it compares, but we’ll see.) Here’s my take on 48fps:

Pros: Incredible clarity and sharpness of detail. Characters and objects in the background are nearly as clear and defined as those in the foreground of a shot. It makes for absolutely gorgeous establishing shots and exploration of new settings (Erebor, the Dwarven Kingdom before Smaug’s attack, is amazing. I’d love to see a film just about the Dwarves and their lives under the mountain). It’s great when steady or slow-moving camera work is applied. Beautiful for scenery or landscape shots; would make for excellent documentary applications.
Cons: Definite “motion sickness” potential during scenes of chaotic action or fast-movement; the increased clarity often feels as if you’re standing on set with the actors/characters, so when they take a crazy tumble down a rabbit hole, for example, you feel just as disoriented…which might not be too pleasant for some. There is a bit of an adjustment period for 48fps; I was jarred by it at the start but warmed up to 95% of its usage over time. 48fps means you cannot hide mistakes…period; there were some poorly-rendered VFX sequences that were unintentionally comical and resembled the old-school tactic of filming a stationary actor in front of a moving background. These effects were bad, bad, bad; there’s no way around it.
Click to expand...

Rating: A-
Click to expand...
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
IndieWire Review

I have never been a Lord of the Rings fanatic, so take that into account, but The Hobbit made me miss Voldemort. I spent a fair amount of time during Peter Jackson’s latest installment in his Tolkien franchise comparing it to the Harry Potter movies, thinking how savvy J.K. Rowling’s approach to magic has been, how successful in the broadest way those films are.

In the end The Hobbit, like Life of Pi, seems so awed with its own technical ingenuity that character and narrative fade into the distance. Freeman breathes some life into all this CGI, partly because Bilbo faces the most human struggles. Stepping outside his comfy house to help the dwarves, learning he’s braver than he thought, he’s an adorable, occasionally irascible hero. But can he lure us into this nearly three-hour fantasy? Let’s just say he’s no Harry Potter.
Click to expand...

LULZ. Worthless review.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
/FILM Review

“Again and again” is also the film’s biggest issue. On a consistent basis, it’s almost as if Jackson forgets he has two more films to release and is forced to pump the brakes. Tangents pop out of nowhere, dialogue scenes are stretched into infinity, and a familiar structure of capture followed by rousing escape, is consistently repeated. Much of the film feels like it’s purposely attempting to stall the dwarves’ quest from progressing.
Click to expand...

One of the biggest advancements Jackson chose to embrace with The Hobbit was shooting at 48 frames per second, now referred to as High Frame Rate (HFR). My screening employed this new technology and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. At times, the film looks immaculate. Regular landscapes and normal shots with static digital effects look so beautiful, it’s almost as if you could press pause and step through the screen. However, when there are a lot of effects on screen, or they move quickly (as when animals are present, for example) they look overly digital and obviously inserted. Fortunately, even with this problem, the look of the film never took me out of the story. I left feeling that HFR is a technology with a promising future, but it’s not quite there yet.

Overall The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a lot of fun. Fans of Jackson, Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings films will enjoy it. However, it’s long and uneven, which keeps it from reaching the heights of Jackson’s first three Middle-Earth films. It’s obvious why and how the director added what he did, but whether or not it’ll all work out is probably a question we can’t answer for two more years.

/Film rating: 7 out of 10
Click to expand...
 
K

Kud Dukan

Member
Seems like a lot of the reviewers have issues with the first half of the film, but that the second half improves immensely.

Overall, it seems like your enjoyment of the film will depend largely on whether you enjoyed the Lord of the Rings films or not.
 
S

SCULLIBUNDO

Banned
AICN Review
As the film sprints through its chaotic prologue, narrative coherence takes a backseat to high-definition visual wizardry; it's a bewildering barrage of footage that looks either spectacular or gallingly fake. But then Jackson's virtual camera plunges deep into the fully-digitized Lonely Mountain to reveal the discovery of the Arkenstone, and suddenly the alleged game-changing promise of AVATAR has finally been realized. What's real and what isn't? I haven't a clue, but it looks amazing. This is the future of event filmmaking, and the possibilities for a director of Jackson's talents to explode it are seemingly endless.

But there are kinks to work out. Many, many kinks. So many that I wonder if Jackson wishes he could've delayed shooting AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY another year while they figured out how to eliminate the occasional and terribly distracting undercranked effect of actors zipping around like coked-up Mack Sennett characters. Also, while the clarity can be awe-inspriring, it has a tendency to make the sets look cheap, the armor chintzy, and the makeup barely worthy of an Asylum production. AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY in high-frame-rate 3D is a deep, vicious pendulum swing between transporting and flat-out unwatchable - and it's impossible to fully adjust to the format because you never know when it's suddenly going to look like a demo reel.
Click to expand...

And therein lies the potential problem with the next two movies. AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY runs a healthy 160-plus minutes, and more than half of it is filler. Worse, I know goddamn well there's not 320-minutes worth of story left. Not even close. If I felt like Jackson was attacking this book with the all-in bravado he brought to THE LORD OF THE RINGS (and setting up more than Tolkien's book delivers), I'd forgive the bloat. But the listlessness of AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY reminds me of the slow boat to Skull Island in KING KONG. We're adrift. So please, Mr. Jackson, wrap this up, and get the hell out of Middle Earth. This is beginning to feel more like cartography than storytelling.
Click to expand...

Wow.
 
A

AstroNut325

Member
Scullibundo said:
/FILM Review
Click to expand...

One of the biggest advancements Jackson chose to embrace with The Hobbit was shooting at 48 frames per second, now referred to as High Frame Rate (HFR). My screening employed this new technology and it’s a bit of a mixed bag. At times, the film looks immaculate. Regular landscapes and normal shots with static digital effects look so beautiful, it’s almost as if you could press pause and step through the screen. However, when there are a lot of effects on screen, or they move quickly (as when animals are present, for example) they look overly digital and obviously inserted. Fortunately, even with this problem, the look of the film never took me out of the story. I left feeling that HFR is a technology with a promising future, but it’s not quite there yet.
Click to expand...

BOOM! So much for the "takes you out of the movie" argument. Can't wait. I have ZERO interest in the movie/story/lore. I'm just excited for the HFR. Wish all movies were shot HFR.
 
B

Bobby Roberts

Banned
HERE COME THE REVIEWS:

Drew McWeeny at HitFix.com

the portion of his review concerned with the 48fps screening he saw:

Now… about that 48FPS. It's being advertised as HFR on the posters, so if you're curious about it, then that's what you need to hunt down. When they showed ten minutes or so of the film at CinemaCon in Vegas, there were many reactions to that, but I wanted to wait and see an entire film in the format, and now that I have, I still don't know what I think. I'm half-convinced that there was a projection problem when I saw the film, because I have trouble believing that what I saw reflected the desires of Peter Jackson and his team. Throughout the entire film, there was a strange Benny Hill quality to sequences, with things that appeared to be sped up. It happened in both dialogue and action sequences, and the overall effect was like watching the most beautifully mastered Blu-ray ever played at 1.5x speed. It doesn't make any sense to me that this process, which is supposedly all about clarity and resolution, would create that hyper-speedy quality unless they were doing something wrong in the projection of it. Peter Jackson would see this immediately. The voices are off-pitch, and the pacing of scenes goes to hell when it's played this way. This cannot be the point of 48FPS, and so, despite having seen the film projected in the format, I'm still not sure I've seen a proper demonstration of it.

In terms of the 3D and the clarity, it was impressive, and there is a strange dreamy quality to the more-video-than-video nature of the format. I think it will definitely throw people who expect that same rich, lush quality that comes from something made on film, and it doesn't really look like anything I've seen before. But that's a surface thing. This is still recognizably the world that was created for "Lord Of The Rings," but it looks more like you're seeing behind-the-scenes footage that reveals it was all a real location instead of seeing something created for a movie. I think the 48FPS format actually makes the digital and practical work more seamless in some ways, but the overall impression takes a while to get used to as a viewer. If you already dislike 3D, I'm not sure this is going to change your mind, and I'm planning to go back and see the film again in regular 2D to see if the issues I have with the look are simply part of seeing the format projected or if they are inherent to the way the movie was created. I'm also determined to see at least a few minutes of another 48FPS screening so I can figure out if it was the projection or the process I had the problem with.
Click to expand...

Jeremy Smith at Aint It Cool News

His opening two paragraphs:

With THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, Peter Jackson has set himself the bizarre challenge of returning to the site of his magnum opus to tell a smaller-in-scope tale via the use of cutting-edge technology (i.e. 48-frames-per-second 3D). It's a lot to reconcile. As the film sprints through its chaotic prologue, narrative coherence takes a backseat to high-definition visual wizardry; it's a bewildering barrage of footage that looks either spectacular or gallingly fake. But then Jackson's virtual camera plunges deep into the fully-digitized Lonely Mountain to reveal the discovery of the Arkenstone, and suddenly the alleged game-changing promise of AVATAR has finally been realized. What's real and what isn't? I haven't a clue, but it looks amazing. This is the future of event filmmaking, and the possibilities for a director of Jackson's talents to explode it are seemingly endless.

But there are kinks to work out. Many, many kinks. So many that I wonder if Jackson wishes he could've delayed shooting AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY another year while they figured out how to eliminate the occasional and terribly distracting undercranked effect of actors zipping around like coked-up Mack Sennett characters. Also, while the clarity can be awe-inspriring, it has a tendency to make the sets look cheap, the armor chintzy, and the makeup barely worthy of an Asylum production. AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY in high-frame-rate 3D is a deep, vicious pendulum swing between transporting and flat-out unwatchable - and it's impossible to fully adjust to the format because you never know when it's suddenly going to look like a demo reel.
Click to expand...
 
V

ViewtifulJC

Banned
There's actually a lot of less than jaw-dropping visual effects work here, whether it's
Azog
-- who looks like he walked out of a video game -- or the horde that chases Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy) or the wargs.
The Goblin King (Barry Humphries)
and his minions are all CGI. At a certain point during battle scenes with these CGI characters it becomes evident that the main actors are swinging at nothing; you never get the sense anything's actually connecting and thus you're never fully invested in these battles or what happens to anyone in them. It's makes you think that if you went 20 minutes in any direction outside of The Shire you'd end up in Toon Town. Add in the brighter landscapes and The Hobbit often looks more like a Narnia film than an LOTR one.

goddamnit, should've hired all those mean old ladies to come back
 
K

Kud Dukan

Member
maquiladora said:
Oh dear, poor reviews in Variety and Hollywood Reporter.

LOTR this ain't...
Click to expand...

Seems there was a pretty big disconnect between the early reactions we heard on Twitter, and the critics. I'm still confident I'll enjoy the film, but it is a little disheartening to read some of the reviews out there.
 
D

Dreamwriter

Member
More than one person has mentioned that bits of the movie felt like they were running too quickly, that the film felt sped up. I wonder if there was a problem with one of the screenings where a 24fps chapter made it into the 48fps movie, thus that chapter would be sped up when running at double speed. Or maybe certain 48fps playback hardware or software is buggy.
 
M

maquiladora

Member
Man, some of those comments on 48fps are making me wish I was seeing this in 24fps first.

What was WB thinking showing that version to reviewers...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

[Breaking News] Peter Jackson is returning to produce the first of the new Middle-earth films [2026]
2 3 4
194
10K
ManaByte replied
I've completed my 20th re-reading of The Lord of the Rings.
2
60
5K
NecrosaroIII replied
  • Locked
Thor Ragnaok adds Jeff Goldblum and Karl Urban, confirms character roles
5 6 7 8 9
434
45K
HeySeuss replied
  • Locked
Thor 3: Ragnarok | Production Thread
13 14 15 16 17
800
142K
Platy replied
  • Locked
NBC & ABC's Fall schedules and new shows for 2016-2017
28
4K
sphagnum replied
Top Bottom