I personally love HFR and have went out of my ways to watch the three The Hobbits in HFR (I traveled to Paris, the only place in France where they have it in HFR).
When people complain about 48fps being weird I just feel like they're just not used to it. It does look weird but after 20 minutes it looks amazing. I'm personally tired of not understanding anything in action movies that uses 24fps. It is kind of a luxury for the eyes to have 48 fps and I predict that in a few years we'll have the same debate we have with console now (60 fps is better than 30 fps).
We got used to 24 fps and so we're making justifications on why it looks better when it clearly doesn't if you take a step back.
I'm not surprised by average viewers being taken aback by HFR. What surprises me is how many ostensibly serious film critics are flat out rejecting it. I just can't believe that's anything less than clearly being on the wrong side of history, like people who probably complained about audio in films, color films, or CGI.
Just because it's new, doesn't mean it's better. And complaining doesn't automatically place one in the wrong side of history.
See 3D films. It keeps reappearing and with it the usual stream of complaints and people dismissing those complaints. However, audiences end up rejecting it after a while, for their own fuzzy reasons that may or may not be related to the complainers' arguments. This is already happening to the current 3D technology, I wonder why...
HFR fits this perfectly. It's new, but it isn't clear if it will hold with audiences. It's the audiences that decide if it's better.
As for CGI... That's a bad example. CGI is generally a good thing, but too much of it isn't.
I don't think it's better because it's new. I think it's better because it's a higher frame rate. It's not some new stylistic choice, it's just more information. It's better in the same way that a higher bandwidth Internet connection is better, or a phone with longer battery life.
I also don't think that 3D films is better in the same absolute sense, although I actually do think 3D is pretty good in theaters. The dizziness complaints about 3D are very valid because of physical implementation details, but I don't think the same about similar complaints about HFR.
People are extremely defensive about the 24 frames, so I feel for you trying to take a stance.
When I watched the Hobbit I thought to myself that some of the breathing movements in the CGI were amazingly fluent and they kind of reminded me of a computer game.
And then I thought, what a loss to Hollywood, that beautiful fluent movements have come to be associated with computer games and not films.
You're trying make an opinion a fact. "Better" has always been subjective when it comes to the senses, and I suspect it always will be. See the whole ridiculous audiophile cottage industry that can sell people $900 wooden volume knobs for their hi-if systems.
We can still watch old Chaplin movie and love it. Because it's good. But if new movies were going to be released in 16fps then nobody would watch that (if it's just one movie people might go because of the novelty). Especially for action movies, there is no excuse not to reach 48, and better 60 fps, since we now have the technology to do this.
Peter Jackson and James Cameron are precursors and they will have the knowledge and the technique before everyone else when everyone will start making 60fps movies.
In action movies, they often use an even faster shutter to reduce motion blur. The choppy motion makes hits look faster and harder. Lately I've noticed they'll even drop several frames from the middle of a punch to make it look harder.
I brought a friend to watch The Hobbit in HFR. He very much a care less and very non technical person. After the show he asked me why the movie not look like a movie but TV video. He said the mountains looked plain, not as grand like in LOTR.
When something it's clearly better than a previous technology, you "get used to it" pretty quickly.
Nobody complained when the first LCD monitors started replacing CRTs.
When then first "retina" displays appeared, the improvement over lower DPIs screens was clear, and nobody complained it was "too sharp".
It's clear that ithe HFR case the issue is not so clear cut: the fact that there are discussions about it (and articles like this one that try to place a scientific base to the fact that many do not like HFR movies), it shows that it's not just a matter of "getting used to it".
When people complain about 48fps being weird I just feel like they're just not used to it. It does look weird but after 20 minutes it looks amazing. I'm personally tired of not understanding anything in action movies that uses 24fps. It is kind of a luxury for the eyes to have 48 fps and I predict that in a few years we'll have the same debate we have with console now (60 fps is better than 30 fps).
We got used to 24 fps and so we're making justifications on why it looks better when it clearly doesn't if you take a step back.