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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.
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.
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.
No, the Lord of the Rings dwarves do not exist and you won't find a human world replacement for them. These are not the same as dwarves in Game of Thrones or Willow. Lord of the Rings dwarves are a separate species from humans. If you used an actor with dwarfism then it would not fit the part.
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The movies are stretched and it shows.
Sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Gandalf knows that Sauron is back. This directly contradicts LotR. In fact, there's no reason Gandalf would let Bilbo keep the ring once he knew Sauron existed.
Actually this is exactly like in the books.
The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Council of Elrond", p. 261
'Some here will remember that many years ago I myself dared to pass the doors of the Necromancer in Dol Guldur, and secretly explored his ways, and found thus that our fears were true: he was none other than Sauron, our Enemy of old, at length taking shape and power again. Some, too, will remember also that Saruman dissuaded us from open deeds against him, and for long we watched him only. Yet at last, as his shadow grew, Saruman yielded, and the Council put forth its strength and drove the evil out of Mirkwood and that was in the very year of the finding of this Ring: a strange chance, if chance it was.
As for the ring, Gandalf did not know it was the One Ring.
Then for the last time the Council met; for now we learned that he was seeking ever more eagerly for the One. We feared then that he had some news of it that we knew nothing of. But Saruman said nay, and repeated what he had said to us before: that the One would never again be found in Middle-earth. (...) [Gandalf] sighed. `There I was at fault,' he said. `I was lulled by the words of Saruman the Wise; but I should have sought for the truth sooner, and our peril would now be less.'
He finally found an ancient scroll to test if it is the One Ring, because on the surface it looks like any other minor magical ring.
And then in my despair I thought again of a test that might make the finding of Gollum unneeded. The ring itself might tell if it were the One. The memory of words at the Council came back to me: words of Saruman, half-heeded at the time. I heard them now clearly in my heart.
` "The Nine, the Seven, and the Three," he said, "had each their proper gem. Not so the One. It was round and unadorned, as it were one of the lesser rings; but its maker set marks upon it that the skilled, maybe, could still see and read."
This is where it all starts in Fellowship of the Ring.
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