3D and over-use of the digital toolbox spoiling the story

Rating: 7/10 (10 December 2012)

No spoilers! Yes the film is long - 11 minutes shy of 3 hours not including credits, and feels longer than the Fellowship of the Rings. I find the digital/camera + 3D that Jackson is using far more distracting than any 48fps (as it was a critic preview in Leicster Square and I was there as guest of a writer). The film looks too sharp,clean and bright a lot of the time. Jackson also likes to keep his camera moving and pan past things in the immediate foreground, a persons shoulder, branches in a tree, and in 3D this is just jarring and distracting. It's not like an early 3D movie where they throw things at the camera but it's nearly that bad. The subtitles (used a few times during some of the elf scenes) also are distractingly floaty. Fire and any birds also don't seem to work so well in the 3D space. This is a problem of the 3D and the strength of the stereo picture generated (in a documentary they show that it is continuously adjustable by moving the 2 cameras). I have no real issue with the 48fps. I don't like the stuttering effect of a panning camera and at 48fps this is a non-issue. I think the film-makers don't have the experience to do 3D well unlike say Avatar where it was subtle and immersive. Now for the digital toolbox. Many of you might have seen King Kong, Indy 4 or Phantom Menace. Here Jackson makes the same mis-steps he does on King Kong, using digital characters to do one unbelievable thing after another. In that it was have humans running in the feet of dinosaurs, then falling through a chasm of vines chased by dinosaurs while not falling off a log despite it being shaken like a dog with a stick. Here we have Hobbit+dwarfs on the side of a moving mountain pointlessly involved in a battle (they're on the mountains legs) and a bridge falling down a chasm with dwarfs hanging off it. Jackson please stop these super-human digital characters doing this rubbish. It's unbelievable and destroys suspension-of-disbelief completely! The bunny sled racing through the forst - OK, I can buy that - but not it doing 100mph across grassland and not disturbing the grass... it just looked like bad special effects shots because you didn't believe it could go so fast and didn't interact with it's environemnt... and didn't work in the story. My next niggle (spoiler ahead) is with Jackson's pointless story changes. Bilbo does not lose the brass buttons escaping through a door-way and later becomes a hero when he shouldn't be. Kili and Fili would be the first to charge into a fight to protect their leader/Thorin. Bilbo is not supposed to be seen as a hero until after the spiders and after the barrel escape in what will be much later in film 2. Other critics have commented on the slow pace, I don't mind this, the book has it's slow scenes. And Galadriel, Gandalf and the council - it's slow, but the acting is good and I like the characters. Freeman as Bilbo is likable, the dwarfs are good fun too and Gandalf and Gollum are amazing as usual. The Hobbit generally follows a path similar to the Fellowhip's course. 10 minutes of history/narration, bag-end and then a journey.