The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug teaser trailer (Page 4 of 5)

Slightly unrelated, but I wish Saruman had been portrayed in a more positive light. I think it would have been much more powerful for the story had he been a good guy here, and not some shady character being a dick to Gandalf and Radaghast.

I think adding Legolas makes more sense than not adding him. His father is featured in the story as the king of the Woodland elves, and all kinds of crazy stuff is going down in Middle Earth. His son, as we all know, is one bad son of a gun. If he wasn't involved, it would be nonsensical. Remember to separate the source material and keep in mind the presentation of the story of Middle Earth is being told in hindsight for film goers, not chronologically like the books.

Nope, you're right on. Gandalf says at one point that Saruman was the greatest and wisest of them all. You get the feeling he really looked up to him. They do sort of show this second aspect in the movies.

Studio execs: we need something for the chicks, because they don't wanna just see 3 hours of cartoon action. Insert Twilight scene here, here and here.

Me too.

As to Saruman, this is a part where Jackson falls in to the Prequel trap of assuming the audience knows that Saruman will turn so we will make him a dick because we know that he is. However, it is a part of the book that Saruman had little regard for Radaghast, so I was not as bothered by that part.

I also thought Radaghast batteling one of the Nazgul, however briefly, was pretty sweet. I am hoping for more of that with the Necromancer.

Say what you like about The Hobbit movie(s), but the extras on the AUJ Extended Edition set are fantastic. The 9 hours (holy crap!!) of content maintains the gold standard that LOTR set. Everyone participates, there's humour and drama and revelation and even introspection about negative aspects that bonus features usually don't cover in the interests of PR.
Fincher and Ridley Scott do good feature-length extras, but Peter Jackson's extras are epic.

The dozen or so minutes of extra scenes are not really worthwhile. There's more fart jokes with the dwarves carrying on like football hooligans at Rivendell. The humour just falls flat for me. It wasn't always successful in LOTR (drinking game, dwarf tossing, burping, etc) but here it's even worse.

So forget the few minutes of longer scenes, and look forward to the commentary and hours of superbly produced extras.

What a steal! I should probably track this down as I was waiting for this edition and I loved the extras overload on the LOTR discs.

Some of the extended scenes are good but not all. The extras are very much worth it, delving in to so much of the production and actors and character development. I loved all of that stuff and well worth it.

Before Gravity at the IMAX I had a rare (for me) opportunity to watch this trailer in 3d and it looked awful. Really gimmicky 3D and the fast action bits were very disorientating and indistinguishable.

Remember those holograms that would occasionally get put on the front of a VHS tape or toy package? You would look at them one way and a part of the image would show, changing the angle show another part. It reminded of that, a completely artificial representation of 3D. The dwarves stand on a cliff rock like they're on a part of the screen that is a pop-up book.

Needless to say, I'll be going to the 2D normalovision showing again, and hoping that someone, somewhere managed to reign in PJ's taste for the excessive.

People always looks to Eowyn as the only example of a strong female character in the Lord of the Rings.

Let's not forget that the entire Elven race is pretty much ruled by one woman. Galadriel is the foremost power of the West, a founding member of the White Council and a wielder of a ring of power. While she doesn't fight in a battle during the main narrative, she's essentially the leader of the rebellion.

With her guidance and military prowess, she was able to rout a large attacking force set from Mordor and Dol Guldur across the Anduin. A victory they won four times. Her and her husband's army pushed back the Orc army and then turned their sights on Dol Guldur, where "Galadriel herself threw down its walls, and laid its pits bare."