[Daradon]

Yeah I thought the first was a little better than good and a little worse than great, but definitely not the masterpiece that the first trilogy was.

And I did find it a little long. And that's coming from a person who owns and loves the extended/directors cuts of the first three.

Second looks good, but I'm not expecting it to be too much better than the first.

And it does seem (sadly) like Jackson is adding too much cg. Still not quite as much as Lucas, but not doing himself any favors. I imagine it's a huge temptation just because it's so much cheaper than sets and costumes and makeup, but don't these directors see there's still something a little off about it that takes you out of the movie if you don't use it perfectly?

I think some movies, though they'd look a little weird now, got away with it, even applauded for it because it was so far ahead of it's time when it came out. Jurassic Park for one. It was amazing, breathtaking. I remember thinking, wow, real dinosaurs! They did it! But only because it was so far ahead of what you had seen to that point. If you made that movie now, even with slightly better dinosaurs, the way they might look with today's tech, it probably wouldn't be nearly as huge as it was then. Because we're used to that level of cg.

The same was for the original LotR trilogy. I remember seeing Gollum and going 'Wow, the first truly believable cg character!' (The new Yoda who came out about a year or so before, still looked a little weird, fake, too shiny) Now, part of that was probably because of the good idea of actually having an actor play Gollum in real time while filming, even if the cg is completely overtop of him, and being able to have the actors play off each other, something they didn't do with Yoda. But part of it was the tech too. They really nailed it. In fact, they nailed a lot of the cg in the way they fused it with the sets and scenery. It looked believable, or at least, like the Jurassic Park example, so fantastically wonderful and ahead of their time, that you didn't worry about how 'realistic' it looked, you just sat in awe in some respect.

But there wasn't any character I felt that way about in The Hobbit. In fact, most of them felt the same way to me as Yoda did when I saw him. A little too shiny, just not right somehow. Gollum still looked pretty cool, but I think that's because again, of Serkis, and also because we already know him as a character, and fell in love with him the first time around. But all in all it felt kinda like there wasn't enough of a jump in technology or production value from what we had seen before to stop your brain from saying, 'well... that doesn't look quite right.' Or maybe they had just got caught in the trap of using too much cg, and not enough set, costume, and makeup. Or maybe both. For whatever reason, there just wasn't that WOW moment this time around. Even the 3D, while done very well, wasn't enough for that WOW moment.

(I think my WOW moment for 3D was Avatar, not sure if I'll have it again. Hobbit was probably done just as well, if not better, but like I said, there's something about the first time you experience a true technological leap)

Still thought it was a decent movie though, and too compare it to the abortion that was TPM, is a little harsh I think.