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.

Comments

Such a Waste

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Such a Waste

[Billly Gates]

What's so horrible about The Hobbit?

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 has songs in it and has more of a personal story and A LOT MORE of what is in the books and material from The Silimarian. The 1st hobbit was a little long, but I liked the 2nd a lot and I loved Misty Mountains which had a nice theme to it that I found lacking in LOTR.

Re:Such a Waste

[khasim]

What's so horrible about The Hobbit?

The book? Nothing. It's a decent story. I like it.

But if you're talking about the movie trilogy then there's a problem. It isn't "The Hobbit". It's a movie that wants to be "tolkienesque" and uses names and scenes that Tolkien had used in his stories. The same as the "I, Robot" movie was with Asimov's stories.

Look at the page count in The Lord of the Rings. Then compare it to the page count in The Hobbit.

Now compare the run time of the movies. Either LoTR got butchered or The Hobbit was puffed up with standard Hollywood hero crap.

I'm skipping it because I do not want ANOTHER generic Hollywood cliche driven green-screen-spectacle-fest.

Re:Such a Waste

[Perky_Goth]

The action scenes from The Hobbit are way, way over the realm of suspension of disbelief. And they're all surrounded by pits, for some reason, but the good guys never trip.

Re: Such a Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

Thorin, the dwarves, Bilbo, all of them are absolutely immortal in the movies. They've been through dozens of incidents which would certainly have killed them all - fantasy story or not - yet they come through completely unscathed every time. Because Hollywood.

Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean "anything goes". It means the story must be internally consistent for the audience to accept it. Wizards, elves, and dragons doesn't mean that Thorin and Company being completely invulnerable is acceptable - unless that invulnerability has been legitimately established within the story world and is consistent with it.

That is not the case here, which is why the writing for the movies is utter shite.

Re:Such a Waste

[Artifakt]

Some of the Hobbit film bits are supposedly from letters JRRT wrote Christopher about 20 years after LOTR came out, describing how he would like to rewrite the book to make it tie in better with LotR and the limited Silmarillion notes he had at the time. Tolkien was supposedly torn between finishing up the Silmarillion or going back and working on a 'better' hobbit first. I suspect there's some truth to this claim - LotR draws from a great many sources that are fundamental in studying early English literature, from Spencer's Faerie Queen to the "Jack the Giant Killer" stories, to the Song of Roland to Beowulf itself, and the Hobbit's literary roots are mostly in one story - the same one Wagner drew on for Das Rheingold. Some of the dwarf naming and such in the Hobbit seems to connect to Finnish mythological tales and maybe some other Scandinavian sources, but the references are mostly truncated there or limited to a few very short phrases to fit in a children's book.
          I can certainly see JRRT deciding to work in some other bits from classics he couldn't really use in LotR. LotR took so long because Tolkien wanted it to have a certain gravitas as fantasy and so aimed for being really encyclopedic in referring to the roots of Fantasy literature, and at least touching broadly on English literature of the mundane and modern kinds. Tolkien even read some Lovecraft (and liked it), probably before writing the scene of the Watcher at the gate to Moria, possibly afterwards to see how it compared, and read or re-read some of the more esoteric works of T. S. Elliot, R L Stevenson and such, maybe just to have a better idea of where he wanted to steer modern English lit. or maybe to see if he needed to actually address these modern works in what he aimed to make his Magnum Opus. What he did afterwards, planning a next stage after becoming such a success, was doubtless quite technically ambitious.
        I respect people saying they don't like this or that, but some of those people might want to do a little research before they label everything they don't like as not true to Tolkien. In particular, the scenes where the dwarves try to use all the gold to kill the dragon seems to have some real connection to Tolkien's plans for the story, and possibly the way there is more about human 'politics' in Laketown is too. Once people get some idea of what might have been the Hobbit, rewritten for an audience the same age as LotR's, they can rag on the Hobbit equivalents of Elven Shield Surfing twice as hard. (Please! I could have done without half the falls in the Goblin caverns and had the height of the other half quartered, and the extended commercial for the Elven Rafting Riveride at Universal Orlando). Still, not everything here needs to be line for line either.

Not looking good

[KeensMustard]

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.

Re:Not looking good

[krups gusto]

Copyrights don't expire anymore.  This is necessary so that great writers like Tolkien are incentivized to keep writing more books.  It also prevents anybody from making Mickey Mouse porn.

Re:Not looking good

[Dutch Gun]

Read LoTR's description of Tom Bombadil again, an equally powerful but rather loony figure in his own right, and tell me that Tolkien couldn't have imagined Radagast the way he was depicted (admittedly probably without the bird shit).

Frodo and Sam stood as if enchanted. The wind puffed out. The leaves hung silently again on stiff branches. There was another burst of song, and then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink. He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. In his hands he carried on a large leaf as on a tray a small pile of white water-lilies.

A bit silly-looking for one of the most powerful entities in Middle-Earth, no? Somewhat frivolous-minded, too. The Council of the Ring considers Bombadil as a safekeeper:

‘No,’ said Gandalf, ‘not willingly. He might [take the ring], if all the free folk of the world begged him, but he would not understand the need. And if he were given the Ring, he would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away. Such things have no hold on his mind. He would be a most unsafe guardian; and that alone is answer enough.’ ‘But in any case,’ said Glorfindel, ‘to send the Ring to him would only postpone the day of evil. He is far away. We could not now take it back to him, unguessed, unmarked by any spy. And even if we could, soon or late the Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it. Could that power be defied by Bombadil alone? I think not. I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall, Last as he was First; and then Night will come.’
 

Why should Radagast have necessarily been a clone of Gandalf or Saruman? Tom comes across as halfway insane or a goofball, dressed like a clown and constantly breaking into song. Gandalf also speaks of him as ancient and powerful, but one who, if they gave him the ring, would literally forget about it. Jackson's take on Radagast was, I think, similar to Bombadil, one who concerned himself more with nature than the goings-on in the world of wizards, men, elves, and dwarves.

A video game

[plopez]

In search of a story.

Re:Trailer not HFR?

[Dutch Gun]

Believe me, 48FPS is not the future. Or if it is, then there is a long way to go in setting it up and filming it properly.

It probably is, but I'm guessing our generation will have a really hard time accepting it. Our minds have been conditioned to think of 24 FPS displays as "cinematic" and higher FPS (30 or higher) at "cheaper", because for years the TV images we've seen *have* looked much "cheaper". It's an association that I don't think we can easily rationalize our way out of. Why do you think videogames have gone so far as to artificially render fake film grain or lens flare artifacts? That's a completely illogical thing to do except for the pleasant association people have with the look of traditional movie media.

Simply put, I think the high frame rate and high fidelity end up causing a negative association in our minds. It's not that it really looks worse - we're just not used to it looking quite so sharp and fluid, and it just doesn't feel "cinematic" to us. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to. Honestly, nothing else makes much sense to me, because otherwise, we're always pushing to make the picture better, more realistic, etc. After all, you can't really blame increased frame rate for making a movie set look more "fake", right? Film has always been a "high resolution" experience, after all.

Or, put another way, I think film technology just fell into the uncanny valley for some people, where it looks so close to reality that their brains are rebelling a bit and causing distractions, which leads to a poor viewing experience.

A general plea for sanity

[wonkey_monkey]

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.

Re:That has to be the most garbled summary....

[DutchUncle]

You may have a problem. I have never found fuck boring.