The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies Trailer Released 156
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 Hobbit didn't take the material seriously (Score:4, Interesting)
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The movies are stretched and it shows. They simply didn't have enough plot or action to fill the time and I got fairly bored at times. There are seemingly endless and mostly pointless action scenes that serve no purpose and frankly aren't all that well done either. The special effects were rushed. The dialog they added is insultingly bad. Etc... While I won't say they are horrible money grab movies on the level of say The Phantom Menace, they could have been a LOT better even if they had just spent more time in the editing room. Basically they knew they would be a commercial success so they really didn't try very hard.
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 is worse regarding the action scenes - the ones in LOTR didn't feel nearly as stretched out. And as for the "songs", there are lyrics but no actual music in the books so any music would be contrived. And frankly NOBODY wanted these movies to be a musical. (If you did then you are the only one) I sure as hell didn't go into them wanting to hear a bunch of "music" and I've read the Lord of the Rings probably close to 20 times. That is not what is the really interesting bit about the books - it's more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else that would have been terrible on the big screen.
Re:Not looking good (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm usually against but-the-book rants in movies but I definitely agree on this. I gave up on the hobbit series being plausibly good as soon as I saw preview footage involving Radagast the Brown.
I mean damn he was A) just a brief mention in the hobbit and B) not some bird-shit coated foil for comic relief he was one of the friggan Istari, one of the 5 Maiar that took on the form of men.
Tolkein would have been flipping tables over it.
Hard to believe same director made both trilogies (Score:3, Interesting)
LOTR: Excellent pacing, lots of suspense, amazing sets, good cinematography, decent casting.
Hobbit: Terrible pacing leading to little suspense, cheap sets, awful cinematography with very awkward angles, mediocre casting.
In The Hobbit, Jackson makes the particularly noob-director mistake of trying to feature far too many characters. Nor does he give us much reason to care about them. Compare the OK Dwarven song in Hobbit 1 with the first encounter of the hobbits with the Nazgul.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Interestingly, this fundamental scene is set up by special effects, but you've also got the nice touch of the creepy crawlies trying to get away from the Nazgul and Frodo's weird (but later understood) response. This scene sets up the whole trilogy: the pitifully out-of-their-depth hobbits vs the servants of evil.
The main problem with LotR, changing the storyline, gets worse in The Hobbit too. Obviously we didn't give Jackson a hard enough time about it.