Review: The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug (2013) AND HFR 3D (48 FPS) or High Frame Rate 3D

Directed By: Peter Jackson

HFR 3D (48 FPS) or High Frame Rate 3D

It is rare in cinema that you truly see something that you have never seen before (in spite all the claims Hollywood blockbusters routinely make). Peter Jackson, technician extraordinaire, with his bull-headed embrace of HFR 3D or High Frame 3D has done exactly that, provided audiences with a truly unprecedented movie-watching experience, unlike anything ever before. On his promise, prima facie, he delivers, but at what cost?

I missed the HFR 3D on (the first part of his needlessly lengthy three part adaptation of a slim children’s volume) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, because of its relative exclusivity. It was the first film ever to be projected in HFR 3D for paying audiences and theatres were just dipping their toes into the water then. A year and a billion dollar box office gross later, HFR 3D is now readily available everywhere, and it speaks to the strength and brand name of Peter Jackson that a single director can cause cinemas worldwide to adopt a completely different projection system at an enormous cost with little foreseeable adoption of this technology by other film-makers.

There was a tremendous hullaballoo over the HFR 3D by critics this time last year when first part was screened. Summarily I, with infinitely more excitement for the technology than the film itself, sat down to watch The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, knowing myself to be a year late to the discussion. And within minutes I realized the full import of what the naysayers were saying and what HFR 3D truly looks like. Suffice to say that it most definitely looks unprecedented, a monstrosity so vile as to sear the cornea of your eyes with its ugliness. 

The cheapest of video, shot on a mobile phone in the infancy of technology would be more cinematic than this 600 million dollar enterprise. Video looks like video but great video photography can look as good as film as shown by Roger Deakins in Skyfall and some other great cinematographers working today. Not the case here, you can practically see the light reflectors just off the frame or the unnerving clarity of digital images, watching the movie in this format was like watching the “Behind the Scenes” or the “Making of documentary” on the big screen. It made me wonder, where’s the movie?

With the overwhelmingly videoy appearance of the images, the film looks like a filmed dress rehearsal, a home video of people dressing up and fooling around on Halloween. The costumes, sets and make-up all lay bare their artifice and any illusion or suspension of disbelief is shattered. It is so constantly jarring as to be akin to the experience of watching the film being made on set than watching anything resembling a finished product in any way.

Then there’s the motion which distracted me in the first minute itself and continued throughout the lengthy duration of the film. In 48 FPS, everything seems to move on fast forward, it’s like watching the film at 1.5X or 2X speed, slow glances become winks, punches lose their impact, every motion becomes exaggerated and unnatural. There is simply too much information here, information between frames that we don’t need to see. Our brain fills in the information between the 24 frames of normal cinema to give us a seamless illusion of motion, but when our brain starts filling in information between the 48 frames of HFR 3D, it looks alien and disconcerting.

All camera moves are distractingly smooth, everything is always in focus, and your brain immediately recognizes the fakeness of it all. The 3D is beyond outstanding, it is genuinely the greatest 3D I have ever seen. But 3D combined with HFR and the horrifying clarity it brings, destroys any sense of scale in these epic films.

What film or 2D generally does is it expands the world outwards from the frame making things look big or giant. What HFR 3D does is it compresses the world into the box of the screen, it is like watching a make-believe play with action figures in a miniature doll house. As Norma Desmond would caustically say, “The pictures have truly got small” and she would be dead right.

HFR 3D is a crime against cinema, a confounding and baffling new technology that seeks to reduce the experience of watching cinema akin to a cheap  “flash play” on a street filmed with a third rate mobile phone. I would any day prefer a film shot on 8 mm with a swarm of grain crawling across the screen than this alien vision. I, as a human, don’t see things this way, nobody does. HFR 3D desecrates not just cinema but the pure human act of even seeing or viewing things, it is not a fad, it is a folly, much less is it a cornerstone, it is a calamity and catastrophe and one of the worst singular contributions to the art and science of cinema.

-500000/5

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

What’s there to say about the film itself though? Picking up the pieces from my awful viewing experience, let me piece together some thoughts on the film itself.

The film is absolutely state-of-the-art in terms of visual effects and production values. This is amazingly seamless, a truly grand achievement in rendering computer generated images, life-like and vivid to the extreme and beyond the point where we can say photo-real. These images are now so far advanced in sophistication that it is like another layer of reality in the movie itself. Smaug, the most significant new special effect, is dazzlingly, amazingly realized and perfection in every way. The various environments created, the abode of the wood elves, the forest of Mirkwood, Dol Guldur the fortress of returning villain Sauron, and, most spectacularly, Erebor, the dwarf kingdom, are towering achievements of production design. Indeed the movie is practically animated, every frame and cranny and nook is very heavily designed and rendered. On that level alone, the film impresses and pleases, there is genuine artistry here in the art.

The story, direction and performances are less successful but seem almost beside the point. There is nothing much to say about any of those and you get the feeling that Jackson’s attention on his film was spent exactly as it is proportioned in this review, more on the design and less on story, character and performances.

The film has two spectacular action sequences that are sure to be favorites for a long time and re-watched endlessly on Blu-Ray – the barrel escape from the wood elves (with some of the most creative orc kills the franchise has seen) and the climatic confrontation of Smaug with the dwarves. This last bit of business is completely dreamed by Jackson as much of the entire film is, the book it is being based on being so slim as to be shorter than any of the three individual scripts for these films. 

Padding material is added in the form of a love triangle between new character Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), returning series star Legolas (Orlando Bloom, more badass than he ever was in the original films) and the youngest dwarf. The dwarves remain the low point of this franchise, you would think that the one thing Jackson would do with 10 hours of footage is develop the dwarves and give them distinguishable personalities. They remain a blur and you couldn’t name or recognize upwards of 3 out of 13 dwarves. They mostly stand in the background and say a few lines here and there. There presence is so insignificant that were their numbers to vary from scene to scene (which they probably do), the audience wouldn’t bat an eyelid. These are truly risible parts for actors as practically extras could have been cast and the films would be exactly the same.

In a surprise, Jackson exactly cuts out a sequence from the book, namely the extremely amusing scene of the introduction of the dwarves to Beorn the shape-shifter. The absence of that scene further high-lights the schizophrenic tone of these Hobbit films, which jump from ultra-serious to grandiose to silly. The book is constantly arch and snarky, playing like a mean-spirited adventure with amusingly macabre undertones, the film tries to play it straight a lot of the times specially with regards to Thorin (Richard Armitage) a character who is always played for gravity and alpha male heroism whereas he was a conceited and unsympathetic brat in the book. New entrant Bard (Luke Evans) is granted a similarly schizophrenic character, he goes from friend of the dwarves to foe to friend again a short while with the barest hints of reason or rhyme.

Howard Shore’s musical score, so outstanding in the first film, was a underwhelming here, maybe because the film is so busy and drawn out at the same time.

3.5/5

Most of the above stars are granted purely in recognition of the technical prowess of the film and the great achievement of its design.