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How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping Choices

December 13th, 2012Top Story

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping Choices

By Thorin Klosowski

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesEver come home from a day of shopping and wondered why on earth you purchased certain items? As it turns out, our brains corrupt our shopping choices to the point that we barely know what we're doing. Here's what's happening and what you can do about it.

We've talked about the stupid things you do when shopping before, but those are just part of the problem. The other big issue? You have cognitive biases that sabotage your decisions, cause you to waste money, and buy things you ay not even really want. Let's dig into a few of the worst ways your brain corrupts your choices when when you're shopping.

Confirmation Bias Causes You to Waste Money on Things You Don't Need

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesConfirmation bias is one of the worst biases we have. You believe your opinion is based on years of objective analysis, right? In reality, your opinion is nothing more than the a collection of information you choose to pay attention to. Confirmation bias is when you only believe information that conforms to your prior belief and you discount everything else. It's the reason hard-lined Republicans watch Fox News and hard-lined Democrats watch MSNBC. Confirmation bias colors your decisions in everything ranging from politics to science, but it's just as impactful on your shopping choices. As financial blog The Simple Dollar points out, confirmation bias is used by advertisers all the time to affect your decisions:

Let's say you've seen repeated advertisements and product placements that convince you that a particular product is really cool. You go into a store, see it on a well-designed display, and find yourself really wanting this item you don't need. You sigh, decide that you can probably afford it, and head to the checkout aisle.

It's not just gadgets that trick your confirmation bias, it's pretty much everything. Take the common cold as an example. As we've talked about before, most "alternative" treatments for a cold, like Vitimin C and zinc, aren't as well proven as basic home remedies. People still believe they work so strongly because they've been told as much for most of their lives. You end up wasting money on something with no proven benefit because you're unwilling to believe evidence to the contrary.

With shopping especially, confirmation bias also causes you to narrow your research to positive results that conform to your previous opinion. The main way to counter this is to keep an open mind, research through a variety of sources, and if the data tells you you're wrong, accept it and find another product.

The Decoy Effect Confuses You Into Thinking You're Getting a Deal

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesThe decoy effect is one of the toughest biases to see because it's essentially a marketing trick. Basically, it's when we change our preference for a product when an expensive product is right next to it. In his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, author Dan Ariely shares this example:

When Williams-Sonoma first introduced a home "bread bakery" machine (for $275), most consumers were not interested...Flustered by the poor sales, the manufacturer of the bread machine brought in a marketing research firm, which suggested a fix: introduce an additional model of the bread maker, one that was not only larger but priced 50 percent higher than the initial machine...Sales began to rise, though it was not the large bread maker that was being sold...people didn't have to make their decision in a vacuum. They could say: "Well, I don't know much about bread makers, but I do know that if I were to buy one, I'd rather have the smaller one for less money."

Here's another way to put it using this years supposed hottest gift: the tablet. You might have no interest in a tablet at all, but when you have the iPad priced at $499 and the smaller Kindle Fire at $159 right next to each other, you're going to buy the cheaper, smaller one. You might even say to yourself, "Well, I don't know much about tablets, but I do know that if I were to buy one, I'd rather have the smaller one for less money."

In most cases, a little bit of research on a product can counteract the decoy effect. It's also important to ask yourself if you're purchasing something you actually want, or if you're just buying it because you think you should. Photo by Intel Free Press.

Hyperbolic Discounting Makes You Buy Items Right Now Because You Can't Wait

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesHyperbolic Discounting is a biases that we've probably all fallen for, knowing full well we were falling for it. Essentially, hyperbolic discounting is when you prefer an option that arrives sooner rather than later.

So, lets say you're standing in a store and you see that a piece of software you want is 25% off. You know for a fact you can order it from Amazon for 50% off, but you don't want to wait. You want the software right now, so you buy it from the store at the higher price instead of Amazon.

Fortunately, this is one of the biases you can really fight against. If you start comparing prices before you're actually in a store (although these mobile apps can help you in the store as well), you have a better chance of putting everything on the same delivery timeline. Two day shipping from Amazon to save 50% sounds pretty good when you're sitting at your computer and thinking about the commute to the store. If you know the variation on prices beforehand, you're more likely to not worry about getting it immediately. Photo by Roger Price.

Restraint Bias Makes You Believe You Actually Have Control Over Impulse Purchases

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesRestraint bias is when you overestimate your ability to control impulsive behavior. You believe you can control your impulses all the time when in fact you're pretty horrible at it. On its own restraint bias is just an annoying quirk of your brain, but when it's coupled with shopping (or any addiction) it means you're more likely to buy things on a whim than you think you are.

As science writer Ed Yong points out, the more control you think have over your impulses, the more likely it is you'll lose control.

So, let's say you walk into an Apple store, because you want to "just check out" a new iPad. You believe that you have the restraint to not actually buy one, but when you get there and start playing with it you convince yourself to buy it on an impulse. You tell yourself you'll do it "just this once." Later that day, you head to the grocery store and in the checkout lane you start flipping through People Magazine. You decide to buy it "just this once" because you never succumb to your impulses. And so on, and so on.

The easiest way to fight against restraint bias is to simply not put yourself in situations where you're challenging your self-control. While you can boost your self-control with practice, it's best to not believe you're in control in the first place and stay away from those situations. Photo by Gord Webster.

Anchoring Makes You Believe the Worth of All Items Based on the First

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesAnchoring is a bias where you rely on the first piece of information you see to set the standard for all the information that follows. For example, if you see that Apple sells their iPad for $499 then you believe that's a fair price for all tablets. In fact, we usually have no idea what a product is worth, and the first company that throws out a number sets the standard for everything else.

Unfortunately, that's not all. That anchor works across different products as well. The Atlantic shares one story about how a store can adjust your anchor:

You walk into a high-end store, let's say it's Hermès, and you see a $7,000 bag. "Haha, that's so stupid!" you tell your friend. "Seven grand for a bag!" Then you spot an awesome watch for $367. Compared to a Timex, that's wildly over-expensive. But compared to the $7,000 price tag you just put to memory, it's a steal. In this way, stores can massage or "anchor" your expectations for spending.

Anchoring works in pretty much any type of shopping experience, from the housing market to groceries stores where everything is always "discounted" from an manufacturer's suggested price. The worst part? Anchoring is really hard to avoid even when you know you're doing it. Like most of these biases, the best thing you can do is acknowledge it exists and challenge your thought process as often as possible. Photo by Jason Meredith.

Choice-Supportive Bias Causes You to Make Stupid Decisions Based on Nostalgia

How Your Brain Corrupts Your Shopping ChoicesChoice-supportive bias is when you only remember the positive attributes of a choice you made in the past. It's part of the explanation behind brand loyalty, and whether you realize it or not, it colors every future decision you make in a bad way.

So, let's say you've worn Converse since childhood, and you continue to purchase them despite the fact they don't seem to last as long as they used to. Your nostalgia for that original purchase, combined with how your memory is blinded by choice-supportive bias causes you to keep buying those same shoes even though you're consistently disappointed with them because you only remember the positive qualities.

The only real way to fight this is to get yourself out of the rut of purchasing the same products, try out different brands, and research other options. Photo by Jacob Bøtter.


The most interesting thing about our biases is the fact they all work together to sabotage our basic thinking and decision-making skills. The worst part is that collectively, we all believe we don't have these biases to begin with. In this case, it's best to simply recognize you have these biases, and keep them in mind when you're out shopping.

Title images by CLIPAREA (Shutterstock) and Mushakesa (Shutterstock).

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Keep Your Causes Off Your License Plates, Assholes

December 13th, 2012Top Story

Keep Your Causes Off Your License Plates, Assholes

By Mobutu Sese Seko

Keep Your Causes Off Your License Plates, AssholesAs we increasingly cluster in ideologically like-minded niches, our experiences with social media become more like highlight video. Some obnoxious buddy is saying BOOYA! about something on DailyKos, or someone else is demanding that we please trade the idiot president to another country for two prospects and cash.

Chances are, this week your friends had an opinion when U.S. District Court Judge James Fox ruled this week that North Carolina's proposed "Choose Life" license plates are unconstitutional. And, more than likely, your friends didn't really know what they were cheering or castigating, because "issues" license plates are a ridiculous conceptual mess.

You have probably seen a "Choose Life" license plate before. Over two dozen states offer them, and most feature the same cloyingly shitty crayon drawing of a little boy and a little girl. They're meant to suggest that the plates were designed by children, so young that they haven't even had the misfortune of discovering talent yet. This is innocence unsullied; you'd have to be some kind of monster to want to quash whatever life drew this twee little thing.

But while it's perfectly reasonable to find the license plate objectionable because it's so godawful looking, the legal arguments against or for it get really complicated. For instance, you or a friend might have railed against the plate's existence as an abuse of government speech, with the government advocating one position at the expense of many others.

Unfortunately, this is how government works. Acts of government are an advocacy of policy in some way: a law was passed or wasn't, and in the process one idea succeeded or failed. Further, because the policy exists, government has incentives to help citizens understand it. This is why PSAs exist and you can see signs telling you not to litter. More often than not, the government advocacy is broadly agreed-upon on. It's to effectuate existing policy, not to lobby for future intensification of it. You're told not to litter, not because the government is planning to one day make you wear an official "no-messes" suit in state parks but because shitting up the place with Burger King commemorative Hobbit cups is ugly, and everyone has to pay to clean it later.

The effectuating-policy argument has helped "Choose Life" plates get past legal challenges in the past. All states have an interest in ensuring the existence of safe and successful adoption programs, for instance, so there's nothing especially menacing about a government saying, "Yo, check that out." This is what many supporters claimed "Choose Life" plates do. For instance, in signing the law in Florida, Governor Jeb Bush said, "It's a pretty tag and it says 'Choose Life' and it's for adoption. If people want to politicize that, they'll politicize anything."

The problem with "Choose Life" is that you have to be familiar with current political debates to draw the adoption conclusion first, and it also calls into mind a lot of amorphous and contradictory ideas, which make the message either bewilderingly useless or disingenuous. For example, the plate is very popular in Florida, and it tends to get handwaved away as an anodyne advocacy of the "culture of life." We all like life, right? Who wouldn't? You gotta be some kind of asshole to go around dissing life.

Florida is also a death penalty state, though, and many of the fans of the license plate are also fans of killing people via due process. That demographic also overlaps with supporters of the state's Stand Your Ground legislation, which celebrates life so much that it removed citizens' obligation to flee potentially mortally threatening situations and instead allows them to lawfully kill another person. Then there's the state economy, which is heavily boosted by numerous military bases. One, MacDill, houses CENTCOM. It's a nice place, and many of the people who work there are really fun to spend time with; however, Florida likes the jobs they bring, and many of those jobs boil down to "figuring out how to kill people, then killing them, as necessary."

As a result, the exhortation "Choose Life" is a weaselly one. If it instead said, "Support Adoption," it would be tough to argue with, because the message and its link to existing government interests would be self-evident. But the State of Florida has profound legal, economic and personal-freedom interests in supporting an anti-life attitude in other cases, muddying its cheerful "ain't alive stuff grand?" crayon picture.

Without any direct relationship between the plate and a specific agency, its purpose becomes the advancement of an ideological argument within partisan politics. Any doubt as to its messaging is removed when you consider that North Carolina's proposed plate law (like Florida's) would have prohibited any proceeds from the plates' sales from going to groups that perform abortions or present it as an option for pregnant women seeking counseling. In short, choose life, but by all means, we encourage you to do so from a menu that has no other options on it.

Because the First Amendment does not apply to state speech, the next natural defense of "issues" license plates is that they reflect private speech. Ostensibly, the state acts like a kind of null entity, an à la carte menu from which you choose how to voice your support and for what. Plates don't represent the state's advocacy but rather one of a series of menu items for citizens' advocacy. Pro-choice or pro-life arguments thus flow from your actions as a citizen-consumer.

This is the interpretation Judge Fox ruled on in the case of North Carolina's "Choose Life" plate, and he judged it unconstitutional because pro-choice options were unavailable. This was a case where "viewpoint discrimination" reacted passively to the likelihood of unequal governmental support of a cause. North Carolina's GOP-dominated General Assembly defeated amendments to add "Trust Women. Respect Choice" license plate alternatives. If you wanted to select a license plate that very plainly embraced a partisan take on an issue as complex and compelling as women's reproductive rights, you—somewhat fittingly—had no choice at all.

What's most interesting about Fox's ruling is the can of worms it fails to address. As a Reagan appointee (recommended by Jesse Helms), he can hardly be considered some liberal firebrand. But by calling attention to a failure to give a voice to major parties to the reproductive rights debate, he also tacitly points up how many other parties are omitted. This applies to virtually any political topic. Viewpoint discrimination is endless; each side of the political divide perceives it.

The First Amendment secures a place even for unpopular attitudes, and a free speech justification for allowing license-plate advocacy demonstrates how limited that speech really is. The approval process for plates requires petitioning and legislative action. It effectively ensures that only popular interpretations on major issues—or only popular issues at all—wind up addressed on a license plate.

Consider gay adoption, which still repels people and sends them to the worryin' rocker and clutching at the "what's to be done?" hanky. Think, too, about single gay men adopting young boys—a scenario that sends bigots back to the erroneous belief that gays (and not straight people) are likelier to be sex offenders and only want children for abuse and gay indoctrination. At a time when "Choose Life" is sometimes rationalized as only a pro-adoption statement in places like Florida and North Carolina, imagine the almost total impossibility of citizens' securing their right to support single gay adoption in those states and be allowed to give voice to their private speech.

If protecting private speech is a valid pretext for creating a "balanced" menagerie of license plates, then the interests of fairness would suggest almost no end to plate messaging. As counterpoint to "Save the Everglades," someone surely deserves the right to say "Fuck 'Em!" That Challenger/Columbia license plate seems mighty dated already. Where's my, "GET OVER IT!" or "No, This Is Not Your Generation's 'Where Were You During The JFK Assassination?' Moment"?

Hell, at some point, any message of sufficient complexity will start crowding out slots for license numbers, until multiple residents are driving around with a "27" license, forcing cops to have to vaguely describe the pictures or words they can make out on the plates. Think of the APBs you could hear. "It was a Sand Hill Crane, REPEAT, Sand Hill Crane. It was also wearing the crew uniform for Dale Earnhardt's #3 car and standing in front of the words NEVER FORGET." After a day, a police scanner would pay for itself.

Which brings up the most elegant solution of all: maybe license plates should just be a plainly visible official means of identifying your goddamn car.

Image by Jim Cooke.

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The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing.

December 13th, 2012Top Story

The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing.

By Kirk Hamilton

The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing."That movie sure felt like watching a video game."

As I walked out of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey earlier this week, that statement was bouncing around in my head. Bloated, histrionic, pandering and derivative, I found The Hobbit to be a resounding disappointment. And it really did feel like a video game.

As we discussed it over a post-movie beer, my moviegoing companion actually mentioned it without prompting. "That was like watching a video game," she mused. "Why was that like watching a video game?" Why, indeed. And what do people mean when they say a movie feels like a video game?

It wasn't the first time someone's made that complaint/comparison about a movie, and it won't be the last. Modern video games have closed the visual gap with the highest-production Hollywood films, and at the same time films have become more computer-enhanced than ever. The visual distance between the two media has been shortened to the point that games are regularly compared with films. It seems appropriate that people would begin to compare films to games, too.

My friend and I weren't the only ones saying that about The Hobbit, either—the comparison has been popping up on twitter and in other reviews, including this one for The Atlantic Wire by former Gawker-er Richard Lawson, titled "'The Hobbit': Like One Bad Video Game.'"

Perhaps the reason that Warner Bros. is forgoing the usual console video-game tie-ins for simple mobile games is because the damn movie already looks like a video game, and not a very fun one at that.

But why is it such a pejorative? "Ew, that movie was like a VIDEO GAME. Gross!" When I say that The Hobbit felt like watching a video game, I certainly don't mean it in a good way. I love video games, so why is the connotation so immediately negative when it comes to film?

The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing.

Like any cross-media comparison, comparing a film to a video game is a form of critical shorthand. And it's a useful one, as it operates on several levels. The comparison contains within it at least two separate complaints, and uses our common understanding of games as a convenient staging ground for them. The first one is obvious: Visuals. But the second one is deeper, and perhaps more damning. It's useful to understand both kinds of comparison, because both help me parse why I found The Hobbit to be such a bummer.

***

Let's start with the surface-level comparison: The Hobbit really does look like a video game. Watching the film isn't like playing a game, it's like watching one. (Lawson: "The most special effects-heavy sequences look very much like the non-playable parts of modern video games—the exposition bits that can amp up the graphics because they don't have to worry about the randomness of play." Can't say I disagree.)

I saw the film in 3D running at 48 frames per second, which, to the uninitiated, is the newfangled way director Peter Jackson wishes it to be viewed. 48fps is a dramatic shift from the current cinematic standard of 24fps, and the upshot is that we see twice as much visual data than we're used to seeing. Most critics are not fans of this technique. Neither am I.

To say that The Hobbit's 48fps presentation is a disaster feels too mild. No, it is a flaming abomination. The easiest way to describe the experience is to conjure that moment when you plug in your new HDTV without realizing that it shipped with its motion interpolation setting switched on. That setting speeds up the TV's output to simulate a higher framerate, so the first time you watch your favorite show on your new TV, everything looks… off.

It's like you're watching Masterpiece Theatre, or a daytime soap opera.

The characters move too smoothly, and everything is too clean. It's like you're watching Masterpiece Theatre, or a daytime soap opera. (Motion interpolation is commonly known as the "soap opera effect.") That's about how The Hobbit feels at 48fps. The framerate-hike serves to grotesquely highlight the collision of hyper-real actors and computer-generated fakery. It's uncomfortable and often goofy, like sitting uncomfortably close to the stage during a theatrical production of Tolkien, praying that the actors won't single you out for audience participation.

The Hobbit's enhanced framerate prompts the video game comparison in a few different ways. Framerates have long been a point of discussion and debate in the video game scene, but in a different way from film. Most console games run at around 30 to 40fps, though souped-up PC games run closer to 60. Framerate tests are used to determine a gaming PC's relative power, and 60fps is something of a gold standard. Players usually tweak a game's settings to attain higher, more consistent framerate—poor framerates can make a game feel sluggish and unpolished, while high framerates feel smooth and responsive. The Call of Duty games famously maintain a 60fps baseline even on on consoles, which is what lends them their eerie, hyper-smooth appearance.

But an increased framerate can also hurt a video game. I remember a couple of years ago, I was showing a friend Uncharted 2 on our apartment's new HDTV. The Uncharted series is famous for its cinematic presentation, but our new TV had motion interpolation toggled on, which made the game quite creepy-looking. Everything moved too realistically, and cinematic sequences that had once safely escaped the uncanny valley were abruptly tossed back into it. We quickly turned off the TV's upsampling and all was well again.

The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing.

Believe it or not, Valve's classic action game Half-Life 2 also suffers at a high framerate. I recently replayed the game on a decently powerful gaming PC, and had no trouble rendering even its most chaotic battle sequences at 60fps. But the higher framerate in Half-LIfe 2 combines with the game's realistic physics to make everything feel somehow small, like you're watching miniatures bounce around an elaborate sci-fi toy-theater. The Combine's fearsome striders and terrifying whale-helicopters tumble from the sky like plastic playthings, and everything feels too controlled and immaculate.

The Hobbit has a similar problem. Everything feels smaller, diminished, from the sets to the backdrops to the action sequences. In particular, a climactic chase sequence through an underground goblin kingdom has no tension at all. It felt like I was peering in on a bunch of tiny men running through a tiny little digital set. When it didn't feel like watching a video game, it felt like watching a tiny amusement park ride.

If movies were games, The Hobbit would be running on the most bleeding-edge gaming PC known to man. The irony is that the increased tech actually serves to make the film significantly less appealing.

***

So the phrase "It looks like a video game," partly refers to The Hobbit's visual appearance. But I get the sense that's not the whole story. If I had seen the film running at a standard framerate, I suspect I would have had similar overall complaints, and my friend would have made the same video game comparison afterward. That's because the complaint is indicative of a deeper problem.

Video games convey drama and consequence in a very different way than other media.

Video games convey drama and consequence in a very different way than other media. In a game, you can die dozens, even hundreds of times, and you'll always be back, replaying the same bit until you win out. As a result, action sequences can feel inflated, and for an outside observer, they can feel shallow. Watching a game, particularly a photorealistic action game, can be confusing and incoherent out of context—why should I care about this? What are the stakes? The main character just took a shotgun blast to the face, got back up, and mowed down twelve bad guys. Where is the tension?

Often in The Hobbit, there's a spectacular amount of crap happening on-screen. Characters tumble all willy-nilly, enemies stack on top of each other, everyone is yelling… but no one appears to be in any real danger. Most of Thorin's heroic band of beardy dwarves are indistinguishable from one another in the heat of the moment, and they all appear to be essentially impervious to physical harm. They fly this way and that, but we never really feel all that worried about any of them. Gandalf is absent for most of the battle sequences, and usually turns up at some culminating moment to wield his godlike powers and save the day. For all its wild action, there's very little actual tension, and I had a hard time finding a purchase.

I felt similarly about many of the action sequences in the Star Wars prequels, particularly the opening space battle in Revenge of the Sith. There are enemy droid spaceships everywhere, the Jedi are zooming all over the place in their starfighters, everything is exploding, lasers are flying off the screen… and yet for all the surface-level histrionics, there's no actual tension. Amazingly enough, the entire sequence is actually dull. We're not worried anyone will die or even be hurt, and there's no specificity to any of it. I remember seeing Episode III in the theater and just kind of spacing out after a little while.

The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing.

Another example comes from the Matrix trilogy. In the first film, Neo faces down Agent Smith in a climactic fight scene. The whole story has been building to this point. We know Neo's task is impossible, but he's going to try anyway, and the brutal throwdown is all the more exhilarating because the stakes are so high. In the second film, a newly superpowered Neo faces down an army of Agent Smiths. This second confrontation may have a lot of whiz-bang effects and choreography, but it contains a fraction of the tension of their first showdown. And safe money says more than one person mentioned how much it felt like watching a video game.

Much of The Hobbit feels similar. Granted, Jackson's directorial flair and imagination save the action sequences from feeling as bland as those of the Star Wars prequels, but the visual cacophony is similarly devoid of tension. And while computer-generated effects are certainly tied up in this whole thing, they're not wholly responsible: Gandalf's showdown with the Balrog in Fellowship of the Ring was almost entirely computer-generated, and even upon a third or fourth viewing it carries more dramatic heft than The Hobbit's entire three-hour runtime. It's no coincidence that Bilbo and Gollum's famous first meeting is the most enjoyable and watchable sequence of the new film. As they circle one another, trading riddles, The Hobbit stops feeling like a video game and starts feeling like a movie.

The Hobbit Feels Like A Video Game. That's Not A Good Thing.

Of course, to disparagingly say "It feels like watching a video game" is to ignore the many ways that video games do create dramatic tension. Those of us who play games will be quick to point out that games build tension differently than films. And besides, not all games are so quick to eschew consequence. (Hello, Dark Souls! Paging ZombiU!) But the exceptions to the rule are beside the point: The comparison is shorthand.

***

Granted, The Hobbit has other problems, as well. (Suffice to say, I have a few bones to pick with Jason's generally positive review.) The source material is less exciting than the main trilogy, and the film is terribly padded—a book of its length has no business being adapted into a hat-trick of three-hour films. There are almost no women in the movie, and it's all so unsexy it makes Fellowship of the Ring seem like the Downton Abbey Christmas special. Thanks to the segmented approach they've taken, there's an unfortunate lack of Smaug, the villainous dragon who, provided Benedict Cumberbatch's performance is as Cumberbatchian as we're all hoping, could well prove to be The Hobbit's answer to Andy Serkis' Gollum.

"Eh? Remember this? You liked this, right? Remember?"

Perhaps most dismayingly, The Hobbit constantly engages in the most patronizing sort of fan-service. Lady Galadriel whispers into a character's mind as her eerie theme music plays. The camera sweeps overhead as characters battle warg-riders on the grasslands. Gandalf appears on a ridge, the sun at his back, or whispers to a moth and sends it off to summon rescue. And every time, the film gently elbows you in the ribs. Eh? Remember this? You liked this, right? Remember?

I don't make the comparison lightly, but too often in The Hobbit Jackson falls into the same traps George Lucas did while making the Star Wars prequels. He confuses action with excitement, and the result is a film devoid of tension, with no risk and therefore no payoff. That Jackson also indulges in Lucas' tendency to rely on his audience's affection for past material only makes the comparison more apt.

I was sorely disappointed by The Hobbit. What could have been a bittersweet, lighthearted return to Middle Earth feels instead like a self-indulgent faux epic, drowning in bloated spectacle and unearned sentiment. It was almost exactly as satisfying and dramatically engaging as watching a stranger play a video game. And there wasn't even an achievement for making it all the way through.

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