It has been a long time since I’ve done one of these but this weekend, in the United States and many other countries (but NOT including here in Australia), comes a major event. One of the season’s most hotly anticipated films, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” premieres with two big extras attached.
On the one hand are trailers and extended previews for next Summer’s blockbuster “Star Trek Into Darkness.” On the other comes a technology that could very much change the way we see cinema in the future – HFR. This 48 frames-per-second viewing technology has drawn very divisive opinion which has trickled over into reaction to the film itself.
Critical reviews for “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” are underwhelming with a 58/100 on Metacritic and a 67% & 6.5/10 on Rotten Tomatoes. This is partly because of the reaction to the frame rates, and partly due to the film itself which takes the opposite approach to Tolkien’s material.
Whereas the ‘Rings’ trilogy trimmed down much of the bloat of those books, ‘Hobbit’ expands on a fairly slender book with all sorts of additional material from the appendices of the ‘Rings’ trilogy.
So now it is your turn to weigh in. What did you think of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”? Did you see it in 2D, 3D or IMAX? Was it at the normal frame rate or the HFR high-speed frame rate? If the latter, what did you think? What did you think of the “Star Trek” footage shown?
About The Critic
