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Also Known As: - |
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| Year of first release: 2012 | |
| Director: Peter Jackson (Bad Taste, The Lord of the Rings 1-3, King Kong) | |
| Actors: Martin Freeman (Hot Fuzz, The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy), Ian McKellen (X-men 1-3, The Lord of the Rings 1-3), Richard Armitage | |
| Country: USA, NZ | |
| Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Epic | |
| Conditions of visioning: 04.12.2013, CINEMA theater, 3D, High Frame Rate | |
| Synopsis: Bilbo Baggins (Freeman), a Hobbit, will be pushed by the magician Gandalf the Grey (McKellen) to become part of an adventure to recover both a vast treasure and the home mountain of a company of 13 dwarves led by Thorin (Armitage). | |
| Review: The prequel to one of the biggest cinema sucesses of all times, based on a thin book but J.R.R. Tolkien that was expanded to fill three movies of three hours each! This new trilogy is directed by the same Peter Jackson, although for a long time Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) has been working on it, and was constrained to leave the project that was taking too long to start. He was pained and even sent an open letter to the fans to express it. We however feel his influence in some character designs throughout the film. The movie was shot in 3D and with the new technique of HFR (High Frame Rate) that displays 48 frames per second instead of the classical 24. Most TV sets have now the option to convert anything you watch to a rate of up to 400 Hz, which is supposed to make the vieweing experience smoother. I don't really like this effect on TVs, it looks artificial and exaggerated. It looks better in The Hobbit, as it is only twice faster and is not converted but shot on purpose at this speed. Still, it took me a good half hour (not to say one hour) to start feeling involved in the movie because of the new visual experience of HFR combined with 3D. The charaters looked to me like actors telling their text, and not Fantasy characters, but maybe this is BECAUSE the HFR+3D makes it look more real, almost like live theater... I am sure people are arguing about that all over the internet already. About the story, I found that it was also difficult to feel involved at the beginning of the movie, because the stakes are much less important than the ones in The Lord of the Rings. Indeed here the mission is to defeat a dragon and get back some gold. But as the movie progresses, this story is cleverly placed back into the context of the whole Middle-Earth History. Some action and battle scenes are great, even if they don't reach the heights of the one in The Lord... CGI characters are perfectly rendered (like the Orcs king or Gollum), with no doubt thanks to the advances made by Weta Digital while working on Tintin. However I felt that CGIs were overused sometimes (Do you need CGI for the fire in a chimney??). But by the time the movie ended I had forgotten my reservations and was quite pleased with the experience. |
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Rating: 7/10
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More than entertainment, an Art.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
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Let me now comment on my own review. Before buying the Blu-ray of An Unexpected Journey I patiently waited the release of the Extended version in November 2013, in order to watch it again and have it fresh in my mind when going to see The Desolation of Smaug in the theater. Unlike the Extended versions of The Lord of the Rings movies, this one only adds a few minutes. It is because the story of the thin book needed to be expanded rather than compressed. I was pleased to watch the movie in more familiar condition: 2D, normal Frame Rate, and in my living room without the noisy crowd around. I think I even enjoyed it more than the first time.
ReplyDeleteBut what really improved my vision of the movie are the 9 hours of making-of documentary. 3 hours are spent in a long making-of following the movie-making in chronological order, very interesting in order to have a broad overview. 3 hours are dedicated to specific technical aspects, like how to write the screenplay, to find locations, to cast the actors, and special effects. Finally the last 3 hours are focused on characters and locations: Goblins, Orcs, Hobbits, Elves... and in particular 1 hour of detailing the 13 Dwarves. This last bit gives you a deep background story on those characters that you don't get when you watch the movie. A lot of effort was spent in differenciating them one from another while in the oiginal novel they were not so. Knowing so many details made me want to watch the movie yet once more before The Desolation of Smaug, which I did. I didn't watch the commentaries yet but I fear they will be redundant with the making-of.
I am almost tempted to increase the rating of An Unexpected Journey from 7/10 to 8/10, but I think I will wait to see the whole trilogy before revising my judgment like this.