I’m starting to feel a little better about Desolation of Smaug than I did after that first trailer… and, frankly, after The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. That exchange between Gandalf and Bilbo about what Bilbo found under the mountain is very nice, and Smaug’s voice is pretty much perfect. (I suppose Jackson is going to hold back what Smaug looks like till the latest possible moment.)
Still. The Hobbit 2 is like a joke title meant to highlight Hollywood’s vacuousness. Jackson’s gonna have to work hard to live that down.
I’m still distracted by the fact that they made Luke Evans’ Bard look so much like Orlando Bloom’s Will Turner. Ah well.
Wait, so the Eye of Sauron is going to be in this? Who’s going to be left for Jackson to bring back for the third film? Beardless Aragorn?
Doomed elf romance! Ninja Legolas! Battles! The reclamation of Moria! Rope swinging!
There’s this really neat book with a similar name. It’s called The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Maybe someday someone will make it into a movie.
For the life of me, I cannot fathom why people wish so strongly to dislike movies before they’ve even seen them.
Speaking only for myself, I wished desperately to like this film. Then I saw the trailer.
Not me. I go into every film wanting to love it. Even Adam Sander films! But I cannot help having preconceptions. I don’t know who *can* prevent that.
RogerBW gets it in one. The trailers for this ‘The Lord of the Rings: Episode Zero.B’ have made it abundently clear that Jackson has utterly given up on giving a flying fig about any ‘honouring’ of the souce material. All I see is a tragic dry hump and *utterly ridiculous* hyperbolic action. Having five minutes of ‘The Hobbit’ in a two hour orgy of excess sounds barftastic to me.
The reviews are coming in as very, very good. And I’m not talking about the first wave of ass-kissing blurbs from the same circle of “One of the year’s ten best!” morons. The critics are people I trust, especially Glenn Erickson from DVDSAVANT.
Is it true to the book? Way, way less than the first film. And, believe it or not, most say that is for the better.