The Hobbit’s Long-Expected Trailer is Stunning
I was never worried about Peter Jackson dropping The Hobbit–despite a few production setbacks, the overwhelming success of The Lord of the Rings films made Tolkien’s first book a lock for the same treatment. However, I expected the movie to look a little…different. It’s been eight years since Jackson finished up The Return of the King, so there was a chance that the first trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey wouldn’t feel quite the same. Well, that was silly of me. The trailer looks amazing, and in the exact same way that Jackson’s trilogy did.
The trailer connects The Hobbit to the previous films most ably, starting with Ian Holm’s Bilbo and then introducing Martin Freeman as a younger version of the brave little hobbit whom we all admire. The trailer’s also quick to establish that it’s not just Bilbo’s story: all of the dwarves are introduced, complete with a mournful song and a pratfall involving Bombur (a.k.a. the Fat Guy). It’s also quick to establish that it’s not just The Hobbit we’ll be seeing: the presence of Galadriel, who wasn’t in the original novel, speaks of all the additional material that Jackson’s importing from other Tolkien sources. Most of all, the trailer’s an excellent example of how to set a mood and sell a movie: there are minimal scenes of monsters and battles, everything’s pieced together coherently, and there’s no Marilyn Manson to be heard. How utterly refreshing.
Of course, this trailer raises all sorts of questions that’ll go unanswered for a long while. I’m most intrigued by how Jackson might handle the supporting cast of thirteen dwarves, not only in their characterizations, but also in how they’ll survive the two-film gauntlet. Jackson’s other films make a habit of killing secondary characters, and there’s canonical precedent for it (not to spoil anything, but Tolkien’s book iced three of them, while the Rankin-Bass cartoon bumped off seven of the poor guys). We’ll have to wait nearly a year to see how this shakes out in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and then longer for the second half, There And Back Again. That’s not a problem. Tolkien fans are never in a hurry, and they take things slow.
