Sometimes, you have to get past an extremely well made movie to enjoy the little nuances posed by its successor, not a comparable one but a decent one in its own premises. The hobbit is one such movie and a nice watch when you keep aside the enthralling experience given to you by Lord of the rings trilogy.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is making a bizarre kind of history by going out in limited release at 48 frames per second (double the usual standard). Couple that with 3D and the movie looks so hyper-real that you see everything that's fake about it, from painted sets to prosthetic noses. The unpleasant effect is similar to watching a movie on a new HD home-theater monitor, shadows obliterated by blinding light – yikes! – reality TV.

Then there's the length of it. The 169 minutes of screen time stretches further than lines for a new iPhone. This hurts since the first 45 minutes of the film traps us in the hobbit home of the young Bilbo Baggins (the excellent Martin Feeeman, Dr. Watson on the BBC'S Sherlock series). Bilbo's surprise and unwelcome guests for dinner include 13 dwarves who stuff food down their gullets and sing like Les Miz fanboys. As a literary work, The Hobbit is a quarter he size of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and takes place 60 years before that epic. One movie would have done the job handily. But Jackson has elongated the tale to three films, each released a year apart, and 9 hours.

The Hobbit starts with a smile as Thorin and his dwarf crew, a pugnacious bunch with epic facial hair, lay siege to Bilbo’s pantry and devour his finest meats and cheeses. Then it’s down to business: Does the recalcitrant little fella feel like a bit of adventure? No, he doesn’t. He’s a hobbit, thank you. But continued reluctance would make for an awfully short film.
Sensing a chance to prove himself, and realizing he’s at the heart of a beloved J.R.R. Tolkien story, Bilbo mans up and leaves the comforts of the shire for a piece of the action.
Said action, as you might have heard, was shot in a hyperspeed 48-frames-per-second format (the standard is 24 FPS; both versions will be in theaters). You can ask 48 different people about the fast format and get 48 different opinions. Here’s mine: As suggested, the 48 FPS look cuts down on the blur factor that usually accompanies the motion in a 3-D movie. The clarity creates a sense of hyper-reality that reminded me of the first time I saw an LED TV. The composition-in-depth can be breathtaking, but the look takes some getting used to, and it frequently took me out of the fantastical Middle-earth mindset. Some visual environments don’t demand realism.
And now, back to your feature presentation.
The Hobbit often feels more like a series of challenges than a story; as one fellow critic asked me during a lengthy combat sequence, “When do you get to the next level?” Video-game jokes aside, I was impressed with how much of the story’s good humor Jackson and Co. manage to weave into the spectacle. It's there in the close shave with a gang of hungry trolls, and it really lifts off once Andy Serkis’ uncanny Gollum enters the picture.

All of that said, what needs resaying is that the good stuff in "The Hobbit" is amazingly good. And mainly animated, from the motion-capture magic of Andy Serkis's Gollum (you can see the little monster's twisted mind and constipated brain churning away in the marvelous riddle game) to the depths of the goblins' tunnels, where the proscenium frame—or floating box, in the 3-D version—teems with life forms previously unimagined and hitherto unimaginable. An overlong adventure enlivened by wonders.