It's getting to the point where I cannot believe directors actually want people to view their films in 3D. Do they have any frame of reference for the consumer experience, or are Peter Jackson and pals just watching tech demo rushes in pin sharp isolation? Nearly three hours of stereoscopic The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is just punishing. For a start it's like watching the film through a dirty gauze. Rapid movements are therefore unreadable blurs. The savage, Spielbergian delights of the collapsing Goblin under-city, presumably the film's action highlight, becomes a swaying, sickly mess of computer generated soup. I was aware of an animated Gandalf gliding through a series of perils, but there was nothing but distance between myself and the on-screen palaver. Firstly the Gandalf drifting across rickety bridges was clearly a rigged render rather than a struggling Sir Ian McKellen, so any idea of excitement is quickly jettisoned. Decades of action films have taught audiences to view visual language in terms of a carnival sideshow - it's always more exciting if someone stands to get hurt. You cannot injure 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, sun-glassed distortion. Take them off and you get a free demonstration of what it's like to be freed from cataracts. It's not ideal. 3D is kind of bearable if the film is a zippy, sub-hundred minute breeze but The Hobbit is endless theme park incident, with anonymous dwarves juggling plates and bumbling through sequences drained of danger. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey then is three hours of endlessly digressing asides that clog up the film's narrative arteries. The piece playing like a gluttonous meal designed for the kind of people who huffed out of Harry Potter screenings moaning that the filmmakers have thought better of including Hermione's Elf Rights subplot. Bores basically.
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