Not me thinking abt how Bard only started wearing that nicer blue coat AFTER Thranduil and his troops arrive which leads me to believe that Thranduil gave it to him.

Legolas in The Hobbit starts to make sense to me. He had a fuckboy phase where he felt the need to show off and cling to any girl he found cool. Then he grew up a little and matured due to his friendship with Aragorn. Then he had his gay awakening with Gimli.

That Rings of Power Trailer

(apologies to Marvel fans, but Tolkien was my first fandom and there’s a lot of discourse going on. I might create a secondary blog related to that…)

I’ve been thinking about the Rings of Power trailer and why it caused the reactions it did. It ran the gamut of ‘What the hell was that?’ to fans admitting through gritted teeth they will give it chance but not holding out a lot of hope.

It wasn’t just about short haired elves, Galadriel in armor, and hobbits in the Second Age. It was missing familiar themes and elements. It missed teasing things that get fans excited, the things they WANT to see.

Go back and look at the first trailer for Fellowship of the Ring. Frodo standing on the road, the world compressing around him, the leaves flying in all directions, the ominous music…. the fans squealed 'The Black Riders!’

I admit I have issues with the Hobbit movie, but the sight of Bilbo running out of his front door to find the dwarves was exciting because it was a moment from the book we knew and loved. It was familiar. It struck a chord.

I know there isn’t a lot written about the Second age, but there are some things we know. Imagine if we had seen a beautiful Numenorian city, a young man walking toward a white tree and someone calling out 'Isiludur!’ he turns and we get a glimpse of the man when he was young. Or someone crafting a beautiful ring and the camera pans out and we see the elf that HAS to be Celebrimbor…. or a too beautiful to be a real elf speaking to Galdriel introducing himself as 'Anatar, the Lord of Gifts’. Those are the things fans are looking for. The familiar. The things we are looking for and what we want to see. That 'might’ have hyped it up more for me. I don’t know.

Original characters aren’t a problem, as long as they don’t distract from the main story. The little Rohan children in the Two Towers running away from conflict didn’t detract. They fleshed out the main story. Hell, if Tauriel had just been a random elf hanging around Mirkwood, maybe I wouldn’t have minder her so much. The point is, save the original characters for the story where we can make up our minds about them later, and let us see the familiar in the trailers and press photos. Yes, I know we saw Galadriel and Elrond, but I want to see the 'new’ people. So far the only person who has garnered my interest is the short clip of whom I assume to Gil-Galad.

I suspect that maybe they’re saving the canon characters to be revealed within the story itself, but they’re doing it backwards. Maybe at some point I’ll care about 'Bronwyn’ and 'Theo’ or the random proto-hobbit, (that is if I last that long with it) but at the moment, I dont’ care.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) - Film Review

Wasted potential: that is the thought that springs to mind when I look back upon The Battle of the Five Armies, the final chapter in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy. Among the most disappointing aspects of this film is that it doesn’t seem to know whether it’s going up or down. What initially started as a rather heartwarming rite-of-passage about a sheltered hobbit finally finding his courage, essentially turns into something quite different by the end of the franchise.

In a sense, the whole film can be summed up as one over-bloated action sequence, in which the audience is showered with what appears to be Hollywood’s main source of income these days: fan service for the sake of nostalgia. The elf-and-mortal romance exhibited by Kili and Tauriel is, of course, little more than a desperate re-enactment of Aragorn and Arwen’s relationship that we saw in The Lord of the Rings. Similarly, the minutes and minutes of screentime dedicated to Legolas don’t seem to serve any other purpose than to remind us that this is indeed the same gravity-defying badass that will accompany Frodo on his quest years later. All in all, it seems that the filmmakers haven’t let slip a single opportunity to shove in a Lord of the Rings reference wherever they could fit one, no matter how far-fetched. Perhaps the most subtle-but-not-so-subtle example of this can be found in a scene towards the end of the film, in which Legolas’s father Thranduil urges him to seek out a young “ranger” whose “name” he must discover for himself. This constant attempt to imitate on the success of its predecessor leaves a lot to be desired because it clearly goes to show the filmmakers’ own lack of faith in their creation. After all, if they truly believed their production was worthy, why should they have felt the need to rely on past triumphs?

That’s not to say that The Battle of the Five Armies is not without its glimmers. As in the previous two films, Martin Freeman practically shines in his role as Bilbo Baggins. In fact, you can expect some rather excellent performances from all across the cast, including Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Richard Armitage as the dwarf-king Thorin, Luke Evans as Bard the Bowman, and Lee Pace as Thranduil. These small glimmers of quality cinema are unfortunately not quite enough to keep The Battle of the Five Armies afloat seeing as the film’s definite shortcomings way overpower them.

Overall, I would call The Battle of the Five Armies a painfully mediocre action film, which, although strayed with some heartfelt performances here and there, unfortunately, does not deliver to the standard set by its predecessor in The Lord of the Rings.

Overall rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars