Your "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" movie guide

Rating: 10/10 (15 December 2012)

Your "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" movie guide.
First, for those of you who LOVED the Lord of the Rings, which was a rich, wonderful "adult level" read in their original book form...remember that The Hobbit was a much lighter read aimed more at the child or young adult (in book form).
Having said that, I am hearing of "critics" viewing the movie as not as well developed (as LoTR) and with many "made up" scenes...
...I am so tired of "critics" who don't know the history of the product they are reviewing"...
...every scene I did indeed remember from something I read about Tolkiens Middle Earth. While not all of them were "directly" from The Hobbit, they are on par with the time-line and come from sources like The Silmarillion.
Plus, The Hobbit "the MOVIE" is NOT The Hobbit "the BOOK". It "includes the book" within its frame of reference but is also designed to give a much broader stroke of Middle Earth as Tolkein envisioned it. Peter Jackson is also trying to neatly create a tie-in for a smooth transition from The Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings movies.
Peter Jackson is the ultimate Hobbit and Hobbit fan; as was I in my youth. What I have liked about all his Tolkien movies is the fact that he seems to have been a fan of many of the artist renderings I enjoyed as a young man (and collected) of Middle Earth. The most notable is the Brothers Hildebrandt. In fact, Gollum's grotto jumped right out of the screen at me as a direct childhood memory...including the shape of the rock on his lake center island.
While there are a few slow areas as Peter develops the complex web he is trying to create, the overall movie worked very well.
Plus I saw it in HFR (High Frame Rate) 3D, which I would highly recommend (even over sound quality). Instead of the normal frame rate of 24fps as most movies are made by, this was filmed at 48fps. Why? The result is a much smoother image which gives the human eye the ability to pick up detail even more than just 1080p itself. Frame rate is not high definition in itself, but the ability to feed more information to the human brain per second. It looked "very" life like. My only negative comment was it also, to me at least, appeared overly "bright". Perhaps that was a wrong setting with the projectionist as this was the first showing (ever) of this technology. In that regard it did not match the lighting of the earlier movies (at all). It came across a little cartoonish...hopefully they will fix this either at the theater or when the final Blu-ray or Red-ray DVD's come out.
Still, even though this is only part I of III, the audience applauded at the end (rare enough) and I walked away having enjoyed myself immensely. Peter Jackson, the ultimate Hobbit, has done it again. :)
Happy Holidays!