I consider myself a casual Lord of the Rings fan. I watched all the movies and thought they were good, I tried to read the novels and was bored out of my mind. I took to the technical achievements of the films, all the new techniques and the immense work that Peter Jackson and his team did are very impressive. I like Peter Jackson as a director. It’s taken a very long time for the prequel to the LotR trilogy to be made, but The Hobbit is finally here.

I never read the book and knew the basics going into the film. I went to a full Peter Jackson Experience showing to see the movie as PJ intended. That means High Frame Rate 3D. First, the story. It’s a bit more kid friendly than the trilogy, showing us the tale of Bilbo Baggins on his first adventure. He is picked by Gandalf the wizard to go on a journey with 14 Dwarves who are on a quest to reclaim their ancicestral home. There’s some funny jokes, some great characters with visuals and an orchestrated score to match the epic journey. The cast is great and despite a long run time of two hours and 40 minutes, I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t know any of what was added or changed from the book, so I have nothing to be annoyed about. The pacing felt good, it always felt like the story was progressing.

Now the technical. There’s a lot of cogs and gears that need to spin perfectly together to make everything work just right with the 3D and High Frame Rate. When it all works, the film looks amazing. The brightest 3D picture I’ve ever seen and never blurred or turned into mud when things got face paced. The 48fps makes things look really weird. The picture is so clear and so smooth, I can’t really compair it to anything else I’ve seen. No movie or TV show looks like this. It’s very disctracting at the beginning. Bilbo looks like he’s running around sped up and camera movement looks turbo charged. Like the rig is on a greased up track with no friction, it just flies around. The lighting, the colors and the depth can make scenes look like you are looking through a View Master. It’s almost like going on a motion simulator ride like Star Tours or The Amazing Spiderman, it’s like a different level of visual fidelity to take in. The computer effects are mostly spectacular. There are some weird integration/composotomg issues here and there where characters don’t look like they are actually interacting with the ground. Instead of running, it looks like a video game glide. Gandalf’s nose looks very fake in the beginning, some weird lighting on the prothstetic I think. Those are my only realy complaints. The facial animation is fantastic and the scene with Gollum and Bilbo is a remarkable moment for cinema.

Taken as just a standard 2D movie, I think there is a lot to like here. LotR fans have no reason not to see this. A return to Middle Earth is a much stronger selling point than I ever thought. The new filming techniques are a worthy experiement I think. It needs more work, but I there is potential there. There’s two more movies for PJ to improve on and it’ll be interesting to see if he sucseeds.