Thursday, December 22, 2011

The Hobbit is Coming

In case you haven't seen the new trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, you can take a look at it here.

I was a little startled this morning when I when on TheOneRing.net to check for news; it had been a while wince I visited the site, and I was reminded to only because I had seen a movie poster on someone's Tumblr for the first time. Instead of seeing more movie posters, of course, I found the trailer that came out yesterday. Seeing it one day isn't bad, but my, did that make me feel behind in news.

Initial thoughts on the trailer are positive, though there is still plenty we haven't seen. The dwarves look strangely unlike dwarves at times, but then, they are in Bilbo's small house most of the time. The use of the song for the trailer was nice: it adds that unique touch that standard-type trailer music wouldn't give. And I love the placement of Gollum at the end: I think we're all curious how Gollum is going to look this time around, and the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter is a favorite in the book. That also seems to show that the movie will, in fact, split quickly after that scene; tonally, this should be a good spot.

I had to smirk at the shot showing Gandalf and Galadriel together; were they hoping that casual filmgoers wouldn't notice so much who the characters are, but would instead think there's a love story involved in the movie?

Especially in the first half of the trailer, I can sense the lighter mood that The Hobbit has in general versus The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo also seems to have that same itchy kind of energy he had in the trilogy.

Hmm, the more I think about this, the more I realize that much indeed is kept from us in this trailer. Sure, it's only for the first half, but we still have no glimpse of the trolls or the goblins/orcs or really much at all from the travels outside of Rivendell (Edit: I was wrong about this--we do see a little of the trolls). I imagine that not only do they want to keep some things secret for now, but these are also the scenes that need heavy CG work, so I'm sure they're not ready to be viewed yet. I'm expecting all the computer work to be polished, polished, polished.

It'll be curious to see how the rest of the marketing material works out in the next year. This trailer gave something of a sense of going back for a little visit to the place you loved, implying a degree of familiarity but also newness and lightheartedness but also with depth of its own.

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