The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

I am currently considering tearing off my own face rather than watching this movie

Pretty sure I'm going to spend the next few moths saying how it looks shit, then go to the cinema and actually enjoy it quite a lot.

It already looks like twice as much of everything that was just unbearable about the last one.

We finally get the Cumberbatch speaking as Smaug at the end.

― Ned Raggett, Tuesday, October 1, 2013 10:21 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

it sounds like they applied a dubstep drop filter to his voice

i'll watch this, it looks like good clean fun

Wizards and elves and stuff. I'll probably see this, and in 3D no less.

Second film is a taut 2 hours and 40 minutes

wish they'd stop rushing thru this story

one hopes that in this one the thrills n spills sequences will at least feel like something is at risk, since big fucking dragon etc

what in the world is going to be in the third movie? is that where they're adding in new stuff?

2nd breakfast, elevenses, etc

The battle of Five Armies is hours and hours.

The Battle of Five Hours

the first on screen battle projected in real time

Remember how the cartoon Hobbit had a higher dwarf death count than the book? I bet this is the same -- a lot of expendable characters there.

They should have expended some of the dwarves before they began shooting. Full dwarf qty was not a point where they needed to adhere strictly to the book.

would have hung together so much better with like 6 fkin dwarves

Snow White only had seven. Who is Bilbo to think he's better than Snow White?

Let the spiders chew up a few imo

let the spiders crinkle their heads to death

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q

so apparently they were sacrificing goats and horses in order to make this shitty picture: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/the-hobbit-animal-deaths-farm

I'd kinda forgotten seeing this last year, yeesh. When the dude told some boring story over a 20-minute cutscene that should have set off alarm bells. No lie, I looked at my watch at one point and like an hour had passed and the wee cunt hadn't even left his fucking house yet

I'm probably going to see this on opening night, be annoyed, then go to it again on Christmas and be annoyed again.

I'm probably going to go and see it and really enjoy it despite obvious glaring flaws like I did the first one.

w chap

If i could be arsed to fp everyone itt putting a cent in jackson pockets i would. sinful use of money in a world where ppl starve.

BRING IT

Feel like I deserve every fp I get

What an appalling movie

Thats prob yr 1st ever id say, didnt enjoy it but what could i do

don't worry i'm clean

Ass=u+me that was aimed at veg xp

Yeah, i didnt assume yrs was the first tbh

NYTimes capsule tag apparently sums it up:

"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” has lots of battles.

Tolkien-loving friend from work went today. just as bad as the first one apparently. tho he was watching in 2D tbf so maybe with enough gimmicks in your face it's amazing.

“They were come to the Desolation of the Dragon,” Tolkien writes partway through “The Hobbit,” in a line that conveys the stateliness of purpose of Bilbo’s journey and its foreboding, “and they were come at the waning of the year.” For a few pleasurable moments, Mr. Jackson pauses at the edge of this poetic cliffhanger — and then barrels right over.

Lovely.

saw it at a preview on tuesday at Odeon leicester square with tons of competition winning kids - great atmosphere! it's far more fun than the first, though again too many boring fucking angelic elves. but the wine barrel sequence is just some pure joyous cinematic shit that people could only hate if they hate life.

life-affirming hobbitses

I haven't seen any of the LOTR movies but this one sounds right up my damn alley

Don't do it! This is just like "Star Wars:" first three are good (second is the best, third is the worst), prequels are awful, doing everything the other three did right only wrong.

xp i think as a metal fan you'd like 'the two towers', it's str8 doom

i think what i took away from the first hobbit was that it looks great, ian mckellen is A+ once again, martin freeman is great, but i forget everything else about it.

Oh come now, Unexpected Journey is fucking leagues better than Phantom Menace.

If by that you mean leagues longer ...

All I know is that I never want to see either ever again.

Well I'm a bit of a UJ apologist, for reasons I'm sure I've gone into on this thread.

i think as a metal fan you'd like 'the two towers', it's str8 doom

it was always my favorite book of the series, which was why there was no way I was going to see it - I have no desire at all to see Gollum realized as a CGI character, he was a super-important figure in my imagination as a child

The first LOTR movie gets everything right, particularly the sense of exploration, of seeing sights like the Argonath for the first time. It also perfectly captures my favourite section of the book, the cat-and-mouse game with the Nazgul on the outskirts of the Shire, when the Nazgul are still scary.

Was going to say (and maybe have said?), a couple of years ago I rewatched the LOTR films, and as I commented to a friend, wow, fans really dodged a bullet. They could have been utterly terrible, but instead the acting, effects, direction - everything was absolutely just right. Didn't even need to impose any caveats. "The Hobbit" - everything was terrible, most mysteriously the effects and sets, which you'd think would have been the only thing to improve in the interim, but no, somehow even those aspects were shittier. Same with "Star Wars," once again. Sort of perfected the approach and effects in the first one, but now, years later, we finally have the technology to do it worse, the way we always envisioned it!

i think in 'the hobbit' what i noticed was the action scenes were slicker but also a bit too close to 'yoda bouncing off the walls with a lightsaber' for me.

plus as much as LOTR is an outsized epic, operating on a canvas 10x larger than 'the hobbit', it also has what seems to be a smaller core of characters we're following. we meet a few more along the way and there are background characters we get to know just a bit but not as many as 'the hobbit'. i mean there's what, like 15 dwarves and a wizard and a hobbit and another two wizards and a "necromancer" and elves and shit plus more.