Waiting for 'The Battle of the Five Armies'...

They will have Thorin in one-on-one combat with Azog, just as they wanted to have Aragorn in one-on-one combat with Sauron. They get to do all the bad things in this trilogy that they wanted to do in LOTR.

The Balrog will have a cameo and fight Gandalf for the second/first time.

I think that all the Orc army scenes in DOS strongly suggest that the Necromancer will intervene in the Battle of the Five Armies. I mean, we already know that Azog and Bolg are his servants, so presumably he has to sign off on their troop movements. I'm not sure the Necromancer himself will make an appearance, but I'd be willing to bet the Nazgul will since they've already been set up in DOS. That might be what vindicates Gandalf to the rest of the White Council. As for the resurrected Smaug, I rather doubt that, but I wouldn't want to underestimate Peter Jackson. But we'll have already seen Smaug in TABA, for his death scene. If he had died in DOS, then I would have considered his resurrection more likely.

Forest Shepherd wrote:TI think what Eldorion is saying is that he hopes Jackson can still film a good battle, as he is clearly missing the mark on making good skirmishes. I remember the excellent sequence at the end of FotR and when I watch, say, the conflict in Lake-town there is NO comparison.

Agreed. I don't expect the BO5A to stand up to Helm's Deep or Pelennor Fields, but it's nice to hope. But yeah, the small-scale battles thus far (and the flashback battle) have all been inferior to their counterparts in LOTR.

My money is still on a defeated Necromancer possessing the dead Smaug and rising back up out the lake with flaming Sauron eyes- Smaugon will then be almost fatally wounded and right at the end he will flee to Mordor (with the usual PJ attention paid to distances), breath fire onto the top of Barad Dur creating the Pj eye of the LotR's films and tranfer into it as the Smaug body turns to bone and ash.

And then I get on a plane to NZ and spend the remainder of my years repeatedly slapping PJ.  

Probably because none of it looks real. Part of that I think is the obnoxious colors. They are so damn bright. LOTR had a grainy, darker color that made all the effects blend in better because it didn't look like a cartoon. Plus the peril. Have we seen any good guys get killed? I mean there were a few CGI elves that died, but I don't really care about that. At Helms Deep, Haldir dying gave the battle a somber tone that made the audience realize "Wow, a character just died. This is serious." Now not only do the characters look fake, the audience realizes that they are in a fake environment and they know they probably won't die. five armies should hopefully change that, especially because the cast has basically said that there are no spoilers to be spoiled because it's all in the book.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:And then I get on a plane to NZ and spend the remainder of my years repeatedly slapping PJ.  

Give him a punch in the throat for me.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:My money is still on a defeated Necromancer possessing the dead Smaug and rising back up out the lake with flaming Sauron eyes- Smaugon will then be almost fatally wounded and right at the end he will flee to Mordor (with the usual PJ attention paid to distances), breath fire onto the top of Barad Dur creating the Pj eye of the LotR's films and tranfer into it as the Smaug body turns to bone and ash.

That makes a disturbing amount of sense given what PJ has already done with these films.

Honestly, though, even if I had wanted all these expansions, I don't think PJ has done a very good job of it.  We're at least two thirds of the way through the films (possibly more, if the rumor that TABA is the shortest of the trilogy turn out to be true) and we've seen all of one scene of the Necromancer and zero of the Nazgul so far.  Instead of following around roid raging Azog and his clone, Bolg, we could have seen Nazgul preparing Mordor for their master's return or gone into Dol Guldur for a first-hand glimpse of evil off the battlefield.  Or whatever; those ideas aren't necessarily good ones, but my point is that the expansions we've seen haven't really amounted to anything yet.  There's been tons of teasing of cool stuff to come but for as long as these movies are (and they are long, even if they're not as long as LOTR) so little of any substance happens in them.  I think AUJ was worse than DOS in this, as the introduction of the "White Council thinks evil was banished forever" idea had the baffling impact of making the Necromancer less of a presence in that film than he was in the corresponding six chapters of the book.

Edit: actually, we saw a spectral Nazgul swing his sword at Radagast for about half a second in AUJ, but I'm not sure if that was supposed to be a mushroom-induced hallucination or not.

Tinuviel wrote:Probably because none of it looks real. Part of that I think is the obnoxious colors. They are so damn bright. LOTR had a grainy, darker color that made all the effects blend in better because it didn't look like a cartoon. Plus the peril. Have we seen any good guys get killed? I mean there were a few CGI elves that died, but I don't really care about that. At Helms Deep, Haldir dying gave the battle a somber tone that made the audience realize "Wow, a character just died. This is serious." Now not only do the characters look fake, the audience realizes that they are in a fake environment and they know they probably won't die. five armies should hopefully change that, especially because the cast has basically said that there are no spoilers to be spoiled because it's all in the book.

I had the exact same feeling. And particularily about the landscapes. None of DoS seemed real to me. And that someone brought up that they added cgi landscape features to the Paradise footage of Beorns house explains a lot. I have a feeling very little was left unaltered.

It certainly makes it strange to use it as an advertisement for the landscapes of New Zealand. And the LotRs films look shockingly real in comparison.

Smaugon

Ringdrotten wrote:Smaugon

!!
This explains the obsession with pronunciation! Smaug + Sauron = Shmaurowg

yup cartoony sums it up. cartoony action, cartoony colour, cartoony characters and cartoony peril. I have felt more afraid for Road Runner than Bilbo.

There were rumors about Smaug breathing fire into Baradur and making Sauron about a year or so ago; it seemed so far fetched back then. Then we saw the movies...
The naivety of youth.

'Richard Armitage is to star in a new production of The Crucible at the Old Vic in London.
The actor, who plays Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit films, will play the role of John Proctor in Arthur Miller's classic play.
The production will be presented in-the-round from 24 June.'- BBC

I wonder what it is about working on a PJ film that seems to send so many of actors hurrying back to the stage afterwards   

Maybe they got used to having to fill in their surroundings with their imagination while acting, so it doesn't feel like such a change.

From what we've seen on making TH there are more backdrops and props on stage than on a PJ film set!

Hearing rumours they might change the name to The Hobbit into the Fire.

Well thats a terrible name.

Wow.  If true, it would be the ultimate capper to the clusterfuck of poor planning and last-minute changes that has been The Hobbit trilogy.  Though on the plus side, it would be one less thing to tie the book to these films in people's minds.

TORn's take: http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014/04/16/88743-exclusive-the-hobbit-there-and-back-again-may-become-the-hobbit-into-the-fire/

I remember when I was hoping we'd simply get a pair of movies called There and Back Again.

I know PJ made Smaug huge, but is that Godzilla behind Bilbo in that poster on that ToRN article?  

I think it's a kaiju who wandered over from the set of GDT's Pacific Rim to say hi to old friends.

(I thought it was a pretty neat poster myself.  It's obviously not a literal representation of Smaug, and it's a helluva lot more distinctive than your standard mish-mash of character portraits.)

It's obviously not a literal representation of Smaug- Eldo

I honestly would not be surprised if a resurrected from the Lake Sauron possessed Smaug also grows to an even more ridiculous size to match the poster, I really wouldn't be surprised any more.

Now people are saying we may see 4 hobbit films...

  just   

                                                                                               

Pettytyrant101 wrote:                                                                                               

Indeed.

And you are under obligation to watch it and report back so the rest of us wouldn't have to suffer.  

I'm contracted by the NotP to review all Tolkien based films. I have recently been trying to get my lawyers to argue that based on DOS, TABA should not legally count as a Tolkien based film, but I fear I may lose and be forced to review it, and any subsequent flogging of a dead horse cinema that may result