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The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies Trailer Released
An anonymous reader writes: The first teaser trailer for the final installment of the Middle Earth saga, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, debuted at Comic-Con, and now Warner Bros have made it available online. While the trailer contains some nice shots on a visual level, very much in keeping with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, about 80% of the trailer's awesomeness is provided by the background music. Pippin's mournful song from Return of the King plays intercut with the doomed mission that Faramir leads on his father Denethor's orders.
Why is he talking about Faramir? Faramir isn't even BORN yet!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
After the travesty of the first two films, I'm not looking forward to the third movie.
While far from perfect, I felt that Peter Jackson at least made an attempt to stay true to the original story in Lord of the Rings. For the Hobbit he didn't hold anything back as sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers. Both he and the Tolkien family should be ashamed they agreed to this abortion screenplay.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I'm not going to watch "Tauriel" or the Dwarves split into 2 parties, or the "black arrow" nonsense, or how Bard is really like Robin Hood.
The first movie was a stretch, the second was bullshit.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
One of the better features of The Hobbit (or There and Back Again) is that Bilbo is knocked unconcious at the beginning of the battle of the 5 armies. And since the story is written from his perspective (or he wrote it) there is virtually no dewcription of the battle itself. SO I was hopeful that we would not be subjected to yet another boilerplate over the top battle scene where actually fearsome creatures (trolls, wargs) repeatedly fail to kill their enemy and participants appear to be able to defy the laws of physics. I mean, for Manwes sake: if i wanted to see acrobats I'd go to the circus. Actual character exposition appears ot be confined to clumsy dialogue. Apparently there is no screen time for visual exposition on the change in Bilbo from comfortable, insular shire hobbit to a slightly amoral but very plucky thief. Instead he (bilbo) needs to convey this through long, confessional speeches with the dwarves, whilst 2 dimensional elves do stupid things.
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The movies are stretched and it shows. They simply didn't have enough plot or action to fill the time and I got fairly bored at times. There are seemingly endless and mostly pointless action scenes that serve no purpose and frankly aren't all that well done either. The special effects were rushed. The dialog they added is insultingly bad. Etc... While I won't say they are horrible money grab movies on the level of say The Phantom Menace, they could have been a LOT better even if they had just spent more time in the editing room. Basically they knew they would be a commercial success so they really didn't try very hard.
LOTR all had battle scenes that took up half the movies that were too long. Songs were not included and plot from the book cut to make room for action and Hollywood.
The Hobbit is worse regarding the action scenes - the ones in LOTR didn't feel nearly as stretched out. And as for the "songs", there are lyrics but no actual music in the books so any music would be contrived. And frankly NOBODY wanted these movies to be a musical. (If you did then you are the only one) I sure as hell didn't go into them wanting to hear a bunch of "music" and I've read the Lord of the Rings probably close to 20 times. That is not what is the really interesting bit about the books - it's more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else that would have been terrible on the big screen.
Will be taking Tolkien's "Leaf, by Niggle" and turning it into a clone of The Swamp Thing.
The article sucked. A direct link to the youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/v/ZSzeFFsKEt4) would have been better.
In search of a story.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
LOTR: Excellent pacing, lots of suspense, amazing sets, good cinematography, decent casting.
Hobbit: Terrible pacing leading to little suspense, cheap sets, awful cinematography with very awkward angles, mediocre casting.
In The Hobbit, Jackson makes the particularly noob-director mistake of trying to feature far too many characters. Nor does he give us much reason to care about them. Compare the OK Dwarven song in Hobbit 1 with the first encounter of the hobbits with the Nazgul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Interestingly, this fundamental scene is set up by special effects, but you've also got the nice touch of the creepy crawlies trying to get away from the Nazgul and Frodo's weird (but later understood) response. This scene sets up the whole trilogy: the pitifully out-of-their-depth hobbits vs the servants of evil.
The main problem with LotR, changing the storyline, gets worse in The Hobbit too. Obviously we didn't give Jackson a hard enough time about it.
It's too bad the trailer is not being released in 48fps HFR just in ordinary 1080p. My local theater is on the HFR list, and showed Journey in HFR but got so much negative feedback that they didn't do a single screening of Smaug in HFR. The next closest HFR-capable theater to me is 3 hours away.
Since the online trailer is just about the only chance most folks will have to see any of the films in HFR, it's a shame that it's not been made available.
Oh hell no. We're complaing because this has got all the signs of what made the first two suck oh so very hard
i am expecting more action scenes. http://bit.ly/1klIVOK
So can I finally get my Lego Smaug now? I've been waiting 37 years for it.
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The movies are stretched and it shows.
Sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread.
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Thank you for the link and reminding us that it was this scene that set the dark foreboding theme for the rest of the trilogy as a serious cinematic interpretation of a classic tale. Unlike The Hobbit which is Hollywood tripe.
Most of the films are nowadays pre-sequels or rehashings of old successes. Then they say assistance is declining because of "piracy". No I dont want to even hear of another starwars, Lord of the Rings, Alien, Terminator sequel or pre-sequel or whatever.
Just a quick word before (too late) everyone starts debating the relative merits of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson's beard, etc.
Other people are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours and that's fine.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Am I the only one to think that it looks mediocre?
It's clearly not nearly as good as The Lord of the Rings was.
The story isn't the problem, it's the direction.
Cate is back as Galadriel. :)
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Peter Jackson is a nice guy, great organiser, and keen as fuck, but he's a crap director.
I mean, what else do you call it when a director and studio execs repeatedly ass-hump JRR Tolkien's corpse until it's a tattered, torn remnant, not even recognizable as related to it's original form?
I'm not kidding.
This isn't The Hobbit...this is "fantasy action movie ver#3, including characters from The Hobbit".
And everyone knew it was coming. Do you know of a single person, anywhere who (when told The Hobbit would be 3 movies) didn't do a double take and say WTF?
I really loved the LOTR movies. I largely agreed with the editorial choices to remove parts that were non-germane to the plot. But this?
This is appalling. The trailer looks appalling, and the first two movies were appalling. Not only were they not The Hobbit, they weren't even GOOD 'generic fantasy movies'.
Fuck you, Peter Jackson, you weird, barefoot shitbird, for the future people your abortion will drive away from what's really a canon of fantasy literature. May your memory as a director rot in hell right next to Ralph Bakshi.
For those disappointed folks who haven't already seen them, CinemaSins has done an amusing job of reviewing the ample superficial flaws in the first two. Watch these, they're more entertaining than these films themselves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the first movie)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (the second)
-Styopa
Um, maybe Ralph Bakshi movie is an atrocity for you. For me it's the best Tolkien adaptation ever.
That rotoscoped steaming turd? I've rarely been more disappointed at a movie. It had reasonable fidelity to the books but that alone was hardly enough to make it good. I remember excitedly renting it from the video store sometime during the 1980s and thought that it was a really badly done movie. I thought the rotoscoping was bizarre and still do - uncanny valley reaction I guess. The voice acting was meh at best and the "action" was nothing to write home to mom about. Plus they released it as The Lord of The Rings but it only covered about half the story. I can live with it being condensed into a single movie even if they chop a lot out but then give some indication that there is more to the story. I clearly remember saying "That's it? Where is the rest of it?"
Jackson's adaptations of LOTR, like the recent The Hobbit trilogy, could have used more editing but it was at least in general a good and engaging movie. Visually excellent, faithful enough to the books in most places, captures the epic The worst bits of Jackson's adaptations are when they start going off script for stupid jokes like the dwarf tossing joke during the battle of helm's deep. It wasn't all bad but a high percentage of the dialog that deviated from Tolkien's words was pretty campy. That sort of thing should have only been on a gag reel. More editing would could have made a tighter story but it was a decent movie even if an imperfect adaptation.
WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief?
Why not? Suspension of disbelief is probably the most important thing about sci-fi and fantasy movies. Far more than say a romantic comedy. You can do it well or you can do it poorly. You need a good script, good acting and good special effects to make a movie like that believable. If you are going to ask the audience to believe in magic or magic-science for 2-3 hours that is fine but you can't simply throw anything on the screen and excuse it just because the story says it is magic. The story has to be carefully crafted, the acting has to be believable and the special effects have to be good enough to keep your brain from screaming "bullshit" the whole time.
I've always had a hard time getting into Dr Who as an example. The stories are often flat out amazing and the acting has had some pretty good moments but the special effects and cinematography have been so bad (especially the older stuff) that my brain simply couldn't accept it. I have the same problem with Star Trek except that the stories aren't as good (IMO) though the FX is better (not great but better). One can enjoy them but I'm always left thinking that they could have been better.
... it severely lessens my anticipation of the movie. It's "the Battle of Five Armies" as stated in the book - there's no second "the". Might seem minor, but there are far more than 5 armies in Middle Earth, so the second "the" is misleading. Plus, the way Tolkien wrote it flows better - and he was a language specialist, after all. Changing the name, even in this minor way, just seems really asinine and/or egotistical to me.
I mean, what else do you call it when a director and studio execs repeatedly ass-hump JRR Tolkien's corpse until it's a tattered, torn remnant, not even recognizable as related to it's original form?
Another day at the office? (or should that be orifice?)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
He seals them in the barrels so they are water tight.
Of course if they are water tight then they are air tight too... That bit never made sense to me even when I was reading it as a kid for the first time. Unless there was a hole in the barrel the dwarves should have suffocated. If there was a hole in barrel they should have drowned.
Thanks, glad someone appreciated it.
Might be interesting to look at how much of the rest of the great aspects of LotR were dependent on things not controlled by Peter Jackson eg Gandalf's rescue of Theoden, Aragorn et al at Helm's Deep, done largely through a CGI dawn and CGI armies.
I always thought of Radagast as being on the path to corruption, not in the sense that Saruman perhaps was, but more in the sense the other two Istari who disappeared off into the east were: distracted from their proper task.
Only Gandalf remained entirely uncorrupted and in the end was rewarded for it.
Didn't Jackson even bother to look at the various book covers of the hobbit paperbacks? Clearly, Smaug was envisioned as a proper 4 legged, 2 wings (ie 6 appendages) dragon. And don't give me that stupid bat-dragon evolution argument. Nature has shown in clear detail that creatures with more than 6 appendages are quite possible (dragon flies for instance have 6 legs and 2 pairs of wings).
Bloody sacriledge I say
well done sir, well done indeed!
Actually, Tolkien collaborated on sheet music w/ Donald Swann:
Point remains that NOBODY wants to go see The Hobbit: A Musical Adventure. (well maybe the audience for Broadway musicals but nobody else) Just because some song lyrics were in the books doesn't mean it is a good idea to put them in a movie, especially one that intends to make any sort of profit.
Word
That that is is that that that that is not is not.