I figured the best way to see this was with all the bells & whistles, so I skipped a free screening at 24fps 3D and paid full price for 48fps Real3D with Dolby ATMOS (there aren't any theaters in LA with IMAX 3D & ATMOS). I'd like to see some of it at 24fps to see if it holds up any better but I can't see watching the whole thing again. I hope you see it at 48fps because I would be interested to hear what someone who loved the movie thought of the format.

To me, the problem with HFR wasn't that it was too much like reality, but that the makeup and acting and special effects all looked chintzy. Not chintzy in the "you BBC guys really did a bad job cutting film and video together" kind of way, or even in the "what have you done to Avatar you awful Best Buy employee" way, but more in the "you really did not deliver that line well and it's impossible to take you seriously" way. It reminded me of when news first started broadcasting in HD and the makeup was still done with SD in mind--but apply that to acting and effects as well. Or it's like seeing a stage performance from the front row, when the actor is playing to the middle of the theater (or a theater actor appearing on film for the first time) -- things are more exaggerated than they need to be to come across. Or, to be even more precise, it's like the first time you see a film print of Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars and the matte lines are suddenly very visible. It's not that it felt "too real" but that its fakeness was obvious. It didn't remind me of a video game at all, really, because with video games the problem is on the other slope of the uncanny valley.

Freeman's performance is understated enough that it still worked, and Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee are great even when chewing scenery. (And Blanchett & Gollum still work). But the dwarves! And the battle scenes, where lots of extras have to look like they're fighting -- I was very aware of it as choreography, the skin tones of the creatures didn't look right (and I had plenty of time to notice this), you could see blows not connecting (the way fights in behind-the-scenes footage of stuntwork looks fake and you can't believe it will look real on film until it does). Anyway, I couldn't suspend disbelief. (With the exception of the dragon attack at the very beginning, although most other people seem to have more problems with the beginning before they get used to the frame rate.)

The ATMOS mix was a whole lot of nothing, at least from our seats in the fourth row (but in a theater where that row is reasonably far from the screen). There were only a few points where it seemed noticeably different than a standard surround mix and it was mostly jarring -- they placed the troll's voices in space, for example, which just made you very aware of the fact that the scene was cut together from footage of cameras at different locations, because it was sort of "The troll is over here! Now he's over here, abruptly! And now he's over here! All without moving!" (And stuff where it should have been great, like the rainstorm, it just didn't do much at all.) In places where it could have been interesting, like the flying boulders, the sound coming from the front speakers and the subwoofers was so loud that anything going on in the surrounds was completely drowned out.

Slower scenes and shots -- Freeman waking up, the riddles, worked better for me with high frame rate, and it did feel more like I was actually seeing the actor and so I'd like to see a different kind of movie made in the format, because the costumes, the makeup, the fight scenes, and the special effects all seemed to suffer the most. Which is to say that this seems like exactly the wrong movie to make most people's first experience of 48fps. Of course, apparently people like that motion-smoothing stuff on their TVs, so who knows. Anyway, I'd love to know what you thought of the 48fps version, as you are more likely to see that than I am to see it in 24fps.