My initial reaction, from someone's Facebook wall, slightly edited:

I need to watch it a few more times so it's less of a shock to the system. I'm still excited, but, I seem to be in the minority for whom this trailer missed the mark.

If you're referring to the quote above, it isn't from me, I think it's Teague's. But I agree as well, I'm a huge fan of Tolkien and the LOTR movies so I just ended up brushing this trailer off.

I like having multiple points of data.

Great, another movie about walking!

I look at trailers in a way that is possibly different from other people. I don't actually care much about the specific stuff happening in the trailer, cause that stuff is taken out of context. Something that looks like it would be an awesome, epic moment or scene in the trailer could be very underwhelming and dumb in the movie, and stuff that looks dumb in the trailer could end up being brilliant in the film.

What I generally tend to look for is the ratio of stuff they're putting in there. Look at the trailer for Wrath of the Titans:

The whole trailer is made up of shots of action sequences or over-the-top dramatic shots of a single character doing something 'bad-ass' in slow motion, usually with a lower angle. It looks like they came up with stuff that would look sweet in a trailer and then wrote around that to kinda cram a plot into the movie somewhere. It looks like the story part of the movie was secondary to getting awesome trailer shots.

The same thing holds true for GI Joe: Retaliation and Battleship, the transformers movies, etc. You can tell those movies are going to suck balls because the trailer is nothing but epic slow-motion shots all quick-cut together to some slick music and none of those shots show any real character or plot going on. It's trailers with nothing but stuff happening. "Stuff Happens: The Movie", as I call them.

This trailer, and, say, the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises have a lot of shots of people kinda talking to each other and more of a sense that there's a story going on, and that the story is more than an excuse to have people fight giant robots or giant monsters or whatever. The draw of the movie is going to be the story and the characters and not, for instance, the one shot where Bane blows up the football field, or the shot here where the dwarves fight the trolls.

Probably could have cut together a better trailer, tonally, but I don't think this one is particularly bad. It gives me more hope for this film than, say, the trailer for Wrath of the Titans gives me for that film.

The first thing I thought was, "please let me like Bilbo".  Which I think I did.  The next thought was, "please let me like the dwarves".  The results to that were mixed.  It ultimately comes down to whether or not I'm going to be able to set aside my attachment to the LOTR characters.  If I can, I'm not worried.

I'll add that I've never more instantly liked a character in a movie than I did those of Merry and Pippen.

I always thought a fun character writing exercise would be, ala "Name That Tune", trying to make an audience like/care about a character in as few lines of dialogue, actions, scenes as possible.  For example, Jack Sparrow standing on top of a mast looking cool and in control.  Cut to him jumping down from said mast and looking worried, as we realize he's actually in a sinking dinghy.  Those two actions were all I needed to like him. 

*I know nothing about sailing so I apologize if ships don't have "masts", or come in dinghy form.  I'm also disappointed that I didn't get to use the word "nigh" in that explanation.  I'll add fifteen minutes to my self-flagellation session.