It's getting to the point where I cannot believe directors actually want people to see their films in 3D. Do they have any frame of reference for the consumer experience, or are they just watching tech demo rushes in isolation? Nearly three hours of 3D The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is just punishing. For a start it's like watching the film through a dirty gauze. Rapid movements are unreadable blurs. The Temple of Doom delights of the collapsing Goblin under city, presumably the film's action highlight, becomes a swaying, sickly CG mess. I was aware of a computer animated Gandalf gliding through a series of perils, but there was nothing but distance between me and the on-screen palava.
Firstly the Gandalf drifting across rickety bridges was clearly an animated render rather than a struggling Sir Ian McKellen, so any idea of excitement is jettisoned. 1980s action films taught me to view action in terms of a carnival sideshow - it's always more exciting if someone stands to get hurt. You cannot injure rig nodes and texture maps so my brain switches off. I become a passive observer. Secondly the glasses you're forced to wear lend the entire enterprise a blurry, sunglassed distortion. Take them off and you get a free demonstration of what it's like to have cataracts. It's not ideal. 3D is kind of bearable if the film is a zippy, sub-hundred minute action film, but The Hobbit is three hours of theme park incident. Anonymous dwarves juggle plates and bumble through sequences drained of any sense of danger. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is three hours of endlessly digressing asides that clog up the film's narrative arteries. It plays like a film designed for the kind of people who huffed out of Harry Potter screenings moaning that the filmmakers have ditched Hermione's Elf Rights subplot. Bores basically.
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