One of these days I’m going to attach a video of myself to these trailer posts, so you can see me morph into a seven year old girl who just got a pony for her birthday. Because that’s really what goes down when I get excited about a movie. There’s squeeing a-plenty.
Behold – the first full trailer for Peter Jackson’s fifth foray into Middle Earth, and the second film of The Hobbit series. You should probably go ahead and click ye ol’ full screen button for this one.
Beorn! A new lady elf! Barrels! Mirkwood spiders! Lee Pace’s eyebrows! If you are not a Tolkien reader, don’t worry, I’m not going to judge you. I hate that, and I will freely admit that it took several tries for me to get into the books. I don’t care how you came to be in this fandom, but I love that you’re here and want to hug you and stare wistfully into the sky while talking about the differences between Lothlorien and Rivendell. But I’m also going to ask you to stop reading at this point, ’cause I’m about to drop some serious spoiler action.
Last winter I decided to read the book again before going to see the film. After I finished, I cried a little bit, and then I just started it over again. I concentrated my second read-through on decisions; namely those scenes that would excite me most to see on a giant screen. I am still at a stalwart between Smaug’s descent on Laketown and the Battle of Five Armies, but can you think of a better internal conflict? Call me a terrible grown-up, but I sure can’t. I’m also left wondering about the timeline of events, and would wager that Jackson will include the meat of the White Council story and the attack on Dol Guldur for the third film. Which means that the finale could potentially be an epic amount of beautiful battle scenes… yeah, decision made.
I am wildly excited that Jackson has chosen to include some tales from the appendices and expand on the story of the White Council and their interest in the Necromancer. I am completely OK with Tauriel, a character created for the film (you gotta admit it was getting a little beefy), but am a little skeptical of the implied romance in the trailer. What I am not OK with is the fact that in a little over a year, Peter Jackson might be done making Tolkien movies, and that gives me a mighty sad. He could just go ahead and do the fall of Numenor and the History of Galadriel and Celeborn and while he’s at it maybe just go ahead and make a movie about the First Age about Melkor and the Balrogs (if there is not a metal band named “Melkor and the Balrogs” you can bet your bippy that I will have formed one by the weekend) and it could have a young Sauron and OK I’ll just go ahead and stop now. I’m not usually comfortable with this much of my nerd showing.
“The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” opens in US theaters on December 13. I don’t think I’ll be seeing this one in the high frame rate. What about you?