The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug teaser trailer went up on YouTube today. Starring all the folks you saw in the first movie, plus Benedict Cumberbatch as The Wrath of Smaug.
Oh, and Evangeline Lilly as a feisty red-headed elf warrior named Tauriel. You didn’t see her in the first movie. Or Tolkien’s book, come to think of it.
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The trailer has me very excited. I didn’t know how I would react to first sightings of Tauriel but I was pleased with what I saw in the theater. I don’t mind the addition of a character to this story, personally, but then I came to my love of the books via the films and so feel differently about them. We’ll see how I react once the movie is released, but as of now I’ve watched the trailer four or five times and each time it excites me. They did a good job with this one.
I dunno. I loved the first Hobbit movie, but have to complain about some of the action in the middle, particularly under the mountain where the drarves and Gandalf fight with orcs — it was way too over the top. Some of the falls, alone, should have killed most of them. And the shots of suspended catwalks swaying over fathomless chasms were totally unbelievable. Those scenes were more like something snipped out of a video game and inserted for no good reason. The film would have been better off if they had been snipped out, instead. The trailer shown has even more of a video game feel. I can only hope that it’s merely trailer-itis — the tendency for all trailers to highlight action and exagerate the pace of events in a movie.
They turned Arwen into Generic Warrior Princess, so why not create another one?
And who knew that Bard the Bowman would turn out to be so spectacularly wooden?