Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Trailer

I think it looks fantastic, for the most part. Of course it’s a trailer, and so the material has been carefully selected, but I love much of what we see here.

One of the best things about the trailer is the Dwarves’ song about the lost gold, and the way the trailer plays it up, using it to score other scenes. As my friend Peter Chattaway pointed out at ArtsAndFaith.com, most of the singing shot for The Lord of the Rings was relegated to the Extended Editions or even to deleted scenes, so it’s encouraging to see this evocative song given such prominence. When I read Tolkien to my kids, I love making up melodies for the songs (sometimes more successfully than other times). This melody has exactly the air of somber longing that I go for in my rendition of the Dwarves’ song. I can’t wait to hear the words “We must away ere break of day / To seek the pale enchanted gold.”

Likewise, although we see some action here, the trailer seems intended to reassure fans that The Hobbit honors the intimacy and smaller scale of Tolkien’s book, that it hasn’t been amped up to bone-crushing Return of the King levels. The bucolic Shire scenes early in The Fellowship of the Ring remain among the most successful elements in the film trilogy, and the later chapters sometimes seem to me to stumble over the very ambition of the overwrought action.

Some people have suggested that Jackson and company were just working too hard toward the end of The Lord of the Rings, and made mistakes in judgment due to exhaustion. If so, I hope the rest and the smaller scale of this project pay off in a surer hand to the end. (Please, please, no skullvalanche-level tonal atrocities, no drinking-game bathos or video-game culture allusions, no staff-shattering sacrileges. See the Extended Edition notes in my Return of the King review if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

The shot of one dwarf wrapped in webs, of course, hints at one of the more striking connections between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit: a forest full of Shelob-like spiders, smaller perhaps but in much greater numbers. It’s hard to imagine them talking in Jackson’s version, or Bilbo taunting them in the same way with his “Attercop! Attercop” song—although a lot of people will be unhappy if they omit the “Attercop” business entirely.)

As young Bilbo, Martin Freeman has struck me from the outset as a canny choice to replace Ian Holm—and from what we see here that seems confirmed. Maybe if they’d shot The Hobbit right after The Lord of the Rings they could have done up Ian Holm like they did for the brief flashback where he finds the Ring, but a few years out that no longer seemed possible.

Thankfully, Gandalf’s age isn’t an issue, and it’s just wonderful to see Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey again. (McKellen had some great moments as Gandalf the White too, but neither McKellen nor Jackson were quite as comfortable with that more transcendent version of the character as with the more fallible earlier version.) McKellen seems to wear the part lightly here, with a twinkle, and less of the foreboding that he projected in much of The Lord of the Rings—all exactly right, I think. McKellen’s Gandalf is one of the most awesomely right and perfect performances of any literary character I’ve ever seen, and I’m so happy there’s more coming. I … I think I’ll cry now.

I don’t have much to say about the casting of the Dwarves yet, except that Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) is younger and more, well, Aragornish than my picture of the character. I don’t know offhand what descriptions of Thorin we have from Tolkien, or whether Tolkien drew any pictures, but Thorin in my mind is an older figure, stout as an oak tree, beard as imposing as a shield. I really hope Jackson’s Thorin doesn’t become in The Hobbit what Aragorn became in the later Rings movies, the all-inspiring hero whose greatness diminishes those around him. (I call this centralizing of awesomeness the Aragorn Effect.) If nothing else, the climax of Tolkien’s story should prevent that—but you never know.

It was shrewd of the editors to save two of the most familiar elements (an image and a voice) for the trailer’s final shots.