3D or not 3D: The Hobbit

The big movie of the weekend/month/season is without a doubt the first of three Hobbit films, which is being released worldwide today.  I haven't seen it yet, but will tomorrow  morning (Saturday) and will have the review up by the afternoon.

Most don't know that there is a bit of controversy surrounding this movie in critics' circles.  First of all, it's very strange that they are taking a book that is dramatically smaller than any of the individual installments of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and making it into 3 different movies.  There is bound to be a lot of filler content, and that's almost never a good thing.

Second, Peter Jackson decided to use new camera setups for this film with a higher frame-rate than any previous feature film has ever used.  A normal Hollywood film would use a 30 frames-per-second (fps) rate, with quite a bit of detail already being showcased.  Mr. Jackson decided that he was going to up it to 48 fps, which is over a 50% increase.  He showed some footage of the new frame rate at Comic Con this year, and it was it horribly panned. People hated it.  But, he was not deterred and went ahead with the higher fps with most of the 3D releases, and in particular the IMAX release.

So, I almost always recommend against the 3D version of a film, but this one I say: run far away from the higher priced, headache inducing 3D. Critics have DESPISED this higher fps, which is one of the main reason that it hasn't gotten higher scores across the board.

Please let me know your decision and if you liked the movie in the comments.