New Hobbit trailerFollow

Link

Looks very impressive.
Would be weird if they overdo it and make the Battle of the Five Armies dwarf (pun!) the siege of Minas Tirith though.

It would be very weird. The total forces in the Battle of the Five Armies were about 2 thousand on the men/elves/dwarves side and about 20 thousand on the Orcs/wargs/bats side. In contrast, there were around 6 thousand in Minas Tirith itself, another 6 thousand Rohan riders, and another 5-6 thousand allied troops that arrived during the battle (not mentioned or shown in the film) and some 100 thousand orcs, plus tens of thousand of various other allied of Mordor (plus Nazgul, Cave Trolls, etc). While I never discount the trend of "bigger is better, and sequels have to be bigger (even when they're prequels)", there's no real value or need here. Absent the scale of a big city involved, you can have a "big" battle with far fewer total troops and still make it epic. In a way, trying to make the armies look too huge would make it harder for the audience to accept. The only backdrop is basically the closed front gate of the mountain, and the valley/hills in the area. No need to fill that with more troops IMO.

Those troops were there, kind of. They just swapped them for the ghost army led my Aragorn & friends.

I would have prefered the regular army from the book, though. The ghosts were much too powerful.




While I did like both characters in the sequel, I find it tiresome how they felt the need to add a romance story to the Hobbit, because a movie without anything like that obviously can't be successful.

I can't get past the height issue; it makes the whole thing weird. Something about short men with tall women that just sets off something in me. Oddly enough, I've no issue seeing a... uh...

****, what do we call people with dwarfism these days? I mean, calling them dwarfs, in reference to their medical condition, is racist or something, right? So what do we call them? Little people?

Anyway, when a male little person (seriously?) is together with a female... regular person (good lord), I don't find that weird at all, but the scene in Avatar where Whatsherface held Jake in like the palm of her hand and was all "I lub you", it felt weird... like... unnatural. Same when Tom Cruise was together with Nicole Kidman. Watching them together, it was like there was something wrong.

I don't even.

Anyway, trailer looks good.

Yeah, but actually imagine how long that scene would have been if they didn't have the ghosts to shut it down?

Considering how long the scene already was, and how much else they needed to pack into the movie, I'm inclined to say that the physical army would have been way, way worse in the end. The movie was already too long.