The final Hobbit film is finally upon us! The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies trailer gives us grand promises, stirring speeches, and what looks to be about a billion perfectly choreographed elves…oh, and Bilbo’s there, too!
Check Out the Final Trailer for The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies!
Published on November 6, 2014
I have to admit that I have been rather jaded after the last few films. But this, trailer admitedly, honestly gave me goosebumps. Makes it feel like the build up will be worth the payoff.
And on the whole, I like the gradual darkening of the tone of theses films. Looking forward to it.
Saruman the White – “I’ll take care of Sauron”
And you did such a fine job of it.
I’ve loved them, and now cannot wait for this one! It definitely looks epic!!
I have this love hate relationship with Peter Jackson, and there were some things about the second Hobbit movie I found seriously irritating, but I am pretty pumped for this. I’ve kind of decided to just go with it and enjoy the spectacle. I’m hoping that this will be the same kind of payoff Return of the King was for the dissapointing Two Towers. Although if somebody went back in time and showed me this trailer (before the various actors were associated with Lord of the Rings), I am not sure I’d guess it was the Hobbit!
Things that look exciting for me – exploring the darker side of Thorin’s nature, the allusions to the fight with the Necromancer (and Saurman ‘taking care’ fo Sauron, ha) and war bats, because, why not?
I am also a bit intrigued at Thranduil’s role and I wonder if instead of going to war because he wants the treasure, if it is going to be more motivated by wanting Tauriel back (which is kind of ugh-worthy in the treating women as prizes trope fashion, but hopefully gets something interesting to do instead of being a possibly fridged love interest).
Generally we are only able to see one movie a year because of babysitting issues, and now I don’t know if it should be Mockingjay, this or Into the Woods! Argh, decisions!
I hope that, once all three movies are available, someone will take the time to edit them down to the single 4-hour or two 2.5-hour movies they should have been.
I will forever revere Peter Jackson for his ability to fit The Lord of the Rings into three of the best movies I have ever seen…but the first two The Hobbit movies have been so ponderous and full of unnecessary side plots that I’ve nearly fallen asleep. I hope this final movie finally gets it right.
And Peter Jackson continues his quest to be the Kiwi Michael Bay.
Love/hate is exactly the same I have felt, although leaning more and more towards hate with the first two hobbits. He so mangles the stories, but the bastard makes it all look so very, very pretty! Serious cognitive dissonance here..
UGH: These bats are made for one purpose. (taking the hobbits to isengard, anyone?)
BUT PRETTY!
UGH: love triangle.
PRETTY BATTLE!
UGH: catapult trolls? Really?
I will say this. I hated the last one, yet I am somehow dying to see this one, can hardly wait for it. Say one thing for Peter Jackson, say he knows how to make fantastic trailers.
But I really hope they make a better bear this time. Seriously, WETA are amazing, but please please leave the animal CGI to someone who does not live half a world away from the nearest mammal!
This thrills me indeed. My defense for (and occasional complain towards) Peter Jackson will continue. He hasn’t deposed Tolkien or harmed his work, but he has help bring it to life for the larger world.
I actually enjoyed the first movie for what it was. I haven’t seen the second one yet because three hour stretches have eluded me, and this makes me really want to pop it on at home.
That said, the big epic battle thing has never been as exciting to me as any of Fellowship. And that the whole thing is now centered around the Battle of the Five Armies…I dunno. But the other bits look intriguing!
Getting my wife to agree to go see the first Hobbit in theaters was pretty tough, especially after dragging her to see the extended version of the Fellowship in theaters (she still argues that I am in her debt). But to my surprise and delight she really enjoyed it. After seeing the not so good second one however, it looks like I have some begging to do to get her on board with this one.
So, I guess they’re not even pretending that Smaug is a major part of this movie? Strange after the dramatic conclusion of the second film.
I’m not that thrilled with the love triangle, but to be fair, it’s not much of a love triangle. Tauriel pretty much clearly chose Kili already, and there wasn’t ever that much between her and Legolas at all. They seemed just like friends who have each others backs and maybe might have been interested in something more, if Kili hadn’t come along instead. It’s not the worst love triangle I’ve ever seen.
To me it was a great trailer ruined by the unnecessary shot of kili wooing tauriel.
@12. The love triangle shows how self indulgent PJ and the brain trust has become. I stood behind every change that was made to LOTR because it was done in the spirit of Tolkien and out of love to better serve the greater story. Some things can’t work in film like they do on a page. But the changes in the Hobbit only serve to prove that they have lost touch with that spirit.
An elf/dwarf love triangle? Tolkein has been rolling over in his grave so much over these last two films he’s probably reached London by now. I was behind the decision to add a new strong female elf character for girls to look up to in this admitted sausage fest. She’s the voice of reason championing a return to the world to take a greater role in fighting the rising evil. Everything she says is right. Everything she does is good, that is up until it is rendered lies by her new infatuation with the one non ugly dwarf that makes a a sexual advance at her. Everything she says to Legolas, though it be true and right is now nothing more than excuses for her to go chase after a boy she fancies.
And sure enough after she convinces Legolas to disobey his father and risk his life, she abandons him to fight the enemy on his own and badly outnumbered on the quest that she convinced him to go on so she can make goo goo eyes with her new crush who has been stabbed with a recycled plot device from a better trilogy. They cribbed a great scene from a better movie and rendered it cliche.
if any of it had been done well I could have lived with it, but it’s just plain bad writing and worse storytelling from a team that should damn well know better by now.
3 three hour movies from 1 three hundred page book that only had enough content for maybe two. Filled with so many superfluous scenes that are there for no other reason than to pad the running time. Where things were cut or moved in LOTR for pacing and to move the story along, in Hobbit they don’t hesitate to add and add, letting the story grind to a stop on multiple occasions.
I never thought I’d be saying this but I’ll be glad when this trilogy is over, at least then the disappointment can end.
I don’t know what happened to you Peter and co. but you need to find yourselves again before you butcher another film.
@13: Sorry, uh…no. The LoTR character changes were NOT in the “spirit of Tolkien.” They completely misunderstood Tolkien by a long shot.
Meh
Wasn’t there going to be a Hobbit in this Hobbit movie?
But I will go, and I will be mostly entertained when I’m not incandescent with nerd-rage.
On a related note, are the HFR versions of the trailers anywhere online?
@14 which weren’t in the spirit? You’ll also note I included the caveat of alterations for film. I didn’t agree with all the changes made (Faramir’s behavior, and Denethor’s one sided characterization) but allowances must be made for pacing and theme.
I wasn’t saying all were good changes, just they were understandable. There were no such in Hobbit.
The elves have moose cavalry?
Jackson’s interpretation of Aragorn is totally different from Tolkien’s, and is filled with self-doubt over his kingshipand his relationship. Tolkien’s Aragorn has no such doubts–he was always the King, and always wanted to take the throne of Gondor. He just had other responsibilities to tend to.
Thanks Colin R, you said what I was going to say. And of course there was Faramir, which I still am not over. I think both Faramir and Aragorn demonstrate that Peter Jackson and company aren’t totally comfortable portraying straight up virtue. Everybody has to have a ‘journey’. I am certainly not opposed to that in and of itself but I really hate what they did to Faramir for the sake of adding more ‘drama’ (when it fact it just dragged the movie on – it wasn’t even interesting and it made no effing sense that the Ringwraith was RIGHT THERE and just let Frodo walk away). Also, Sam would never leave Frodo, Treebeard didn’t need to be tricked into fighting, and Theoden wasn’t so whiny about fighting either.
That said, overall, I do agree that many of the cuts/pacing changes DID keep in spirit of Tolkien and overall I consider the LOTR movies very good. Severeal of the scenes in Return of the King still bring a tear to my eye. I’ll have to see how the Hobbit movies all come together. I totally agree with 13 about Tauriel and how they’ve messed up here. I was able to understand fleshing out the world more and adding some female characters to show a wider view of Middle Earth, but when your female character just ends up as the focus of a love triangle that does nothing but add more minutes to a bloated film…eh. At least as you point out, she does have some other stuff to do and say, so I hope she gets more of that in the movie.
@20 @21. I actually thought Aragorn’s reluctance was well done. Again, this goes to the difference between book and film. In the novels Aragorn is essentially the same person on page one as he is on the final page despite going through everything he did. You can’t do that in a film, a character needs to grow. Faramir’s portrayal regarding Frodo and the ring was painful to me but you can’t spend 1 & 3/4 of a trilogy building something up as the ultimate corrupting influence and then have a character walk up and say “were it laying by the roadside I would not take it up”. There has to be a struggle to validate the danger, and painful as it was to watch, Faramir did get there in the end and proved to be a better man. Ultimately it’s all about story and keeping it compelling.
As to having trouble portraying virtue? There’s a reason why Batman is more successful than superman. We can relate to batman. He’s got doubts, flaws, demons, superman is a self assured, nigh invulnerable blemish free Boy Scout. It’s great when we’re little kids but as we get older it becomes harder to relate to. The world isn’t like that. It’s why we got the gritty superman reboot. (Which largely sucked btw)
Aragorn was basically superman in the books. Legolas and gimli started as enemies, or at least reluctant allies and through it all became best of friends in spite of the racial divide. Each hobbit found their own strength and courage, their own growth as characters (literal growth in the case of merry and pip). Gandalf ascended from grey to white, and boromir died. Every member of the fellowship went through some sort of change…except Aragorn. He merely went from aspiring King…to King. I was happy to see him get an evolutionary character arc of his own, he deserved one.
Tolkein was a student of storytelling and there was a reason he thought LOTR was unfilmable beyond the spectacle. It was because some of the elements wouldn’t translate well to the screen. I firmly believe that after watching the trilogy he would have nodded and said “I’m not happy with the changes but they worked, and so did the film.” With the hobbit I think he would have started digging trenches in preparation for war while screaming “what have you done! You butchers!”
But that’s just my opinion.
And while Tauriel may have been given things to do and say, everything rings false because her actions become all about a boy who…
SPOILERS
is going to die anyway.
Unless Peter Fran and Phillipa decide to change that too. Nothing would shock me at this point.
The stuff with Kili and Tauriel is harmless and kind of fun–that’s exactly the kind of thing that Jackson CAN get away with. It’s ok to fill in the margins. I’m less pleased with his interpretation of dwarves as D&D heroes–in the novels they mostly are there to complain and get in trouble. By expanding the roles of dwarves and elves, Jackson has crowded out Bilbo–he didn’t even get to single-handedly save everyone from spiders.
@22, I suspect that Jackson will still kill Kili off, if only to pay respect to the books. But the manner of his death will change; I see a death scene where he gets to talk to Tauriel and then dies in her arms. Love unrequited and all that. And to explain why Tauriel doesn’t show up in LOTR later, she will take the ship to the West and fade away.
@22: To get things out of the way, I’m totally on board with you in regards to the Hobbit.
Other people have pretty much said what I was thinking about in terms of character. As for your further thoughts on Aragorn, I’m just not sold that every character has to have a journey. Why is that? Because a director said it? Because it’s a convention? Aragorn is 87 years old at the start of the series. How much growth is he going to go through? It would be one thing if the movies decided to show some reluctance on his part but he was willing to go on with his duty for a higher purpose; in the movies, he is outright shunning his duty and has to have his arm twisted by Elrond.
As for “gritty” characters sometimes being more popular, sure, sometimes the elements of a darker nature seem more attractive–but that’s not to say we are then obligated to include those elements. To do so is a conceit that the purpose of the film is to hook as many people as possible and make money. Someone might say, “Of course!”…but that’s a problem.
As for Superman vs. Batman, to say that Batman is more popular doesn’t mean that Superman doesn’t work at all or that only children like Superman. Superman has a huge fanbase still. The fact that people try to seed so much Batman/Superman contention should attest to his popularity. Indeed, one of the things that people hated about the reboot is that the “gritty” take on Superman was not true to the character, so obviously people still appreciate that side of him. Let alone a whole aside on the importance of positive role models and a depiction of virtue in films, rather than just settling for “flawed realism.”
Anyway, I will agree with you so far as the changes in LoTR at least had a purpose and line of reasoning behind them, even if I completely disagree with that reasoning. I agree that the “reasoning” behind the Hobbit changes is a bit baffling and seems to come off as little more than self-indulgence on PJ’s part. The changes do nothing to tighten the story and indeed call for the creation of additional movies beyond what should have been required to tell this narrative.
Character arcs are a modern notion. Tolkien wanted to create a mythology. Mythic characters often are not changing much. Such characters may seem flat to modern audiences, who are used to gritty backstories, but they fit Tolkien’s intentions.
“You can’t do that in a film, a character needs to grow.”
You can’t do it in a film but it’s okay in the book? Pffft. That’s what Jackson failed to understand about Aragorn. He was a larger than life hero, a legend. He wasn’t meant to be our entree into the story, the hobbits were. He wasn’t meant to have a ‘journey’, he had a destiny.
If Tolkien wrote him that way, then who was Jackson to decide he had to be reluctant and whiny? @21 is right, Jackson is uncomfortable with straight up virtue, and thus missed the boat completely on Aragorn. He, aside from Faramir, was the great disappointment in an otherwise great film for me.
As for the Hobbit trilogy, after the idiotic second film we’re not going to see this in the theater. But we are kind of interested in the epic nine-part adaptation of Curious George he has in the making. I’ve heard the Man in the Yellow Hat has a moving character arc filled with self-loathing about taking George out of his native habitat.
Others have hit the main points, but the other thing I wanted to point out, and that I’ve seen Jackson say as well, as that I never bought the ‘we can’t have Faramir reject the Ring because that undermines its menace’ – but Tolkien did seem to manage that just fine, I never felt that the Ring wasn’t menacing or evil because Faramir was able to resist it.
But, what I really wanted to say was that I just finished a reread of the Hobbit, and how I managed to miss this in the other dozen times I’ve read the book, I don’t know, but there are totally war bats at the Battle of the Five Armies. Eeeee!
Also, Thorin is a dick.
@28: In the Jackson version, Thorin is a human.
Also, that was the other thing I was going to say about Faramir…he never picks it up because he knows to not let himself get lured by that little bit in the first place. He knows that if he got into it, he wouldn’t be able to resist it, so it doesn’t make the Ring less menacing for him to reject it outright. Not to mention he’s supposed to be in contrast to his brother.
Plus, Jackson’s explanation makes NO SENSE, because in the first film he has Gandalf AND Galadriel both rejecting it after being freely offered it, because they know of the danger of the temptation. So they reject it outright. Like Faramir should have. Not to mention Aragorn passing up an opportunity to take it from Frodo (in the beginning of his personal character “journey”, no less!) in the first film, which wasn’t in the book at all.
It’s been a looooong while since I read The Hobbit but… isn’t Bilbo unconscious for the entire Battle of Five Armies?
No, he’s awake for most of it (although wearing his Ring and keeping out of it – so I do wonder if he’ll take a more active role in the movie), and then when the Eagles come he is the first to see them and yell out, but then a rock hits him on the head and he passes out.