Let's *promote this baby.

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Tuesday, October 1st, 2013 6:13am PDT - promote requested by original submitter RFlagg.

This is to the Lord of the Rings films, what the StarWars prequels were to the original Star Wars films.

(a 'hit' that starts with an 's')

I got a nerd BONER.

sufficiently creepy.

it moved a little.

Nah, they're not THAT bad.

...and to be fair, Lucas had no clue what the prequels would be when he did ep. 4-6, he just made shit up. At least The Hobbit was written BEFORE LoTR.

I just love the fact that Smaug and Bilbo are Sherlock and Watson!

Plus, I just can't get over Richard Armitage's nose piece in these.

Wait? What? How? Not sure we live in the same world.

This is NOT The Hobbit.

VERY true! but still, a VERY good retelling. at least the first one was.

Might see thise purely for the scinography (?) just looks stunning.

And for the star wars was to blah blah, those movies all suck.

The kind of sarcastic, awkward "The Office"-style humour they introduced into the first Hobbit movie was a real turn-off for me, as was the sloppy, rushed-looking CGI (there's a scene at Rivendell where they didn't even bother replacing the scale doubles' faces with the actors' faces) and the odd habit of having the characters fall hundreds of feet onto solid rock without breaking any bones (this happens at least three times in An Unexpected Journey).

The Hobbit is a children's book, and doesn't meet the tone of its sequel very well, even after Tolkien's revised edition. It is a lighter book than the Lord of the Rings, in every sense, and the first film showed that it really can't bear the weight of either the padding PJ has added to the story, nor the efforts to bring a more Rings-style feeling of epic seriousness to what is a small, selfish story about some dwarves looking for gold. The epic/serious tone constantly conflicts with the childish slapstick humour, meaning that neither really work.

It would have been much better as a single 2.5-hour film. I dread to think how much wandering about, awkward humour, diversions from the story, too-weighty extracts from the LOTR appendices and (oh goody) dull Elven love story padding is to come in the next 6 hours of this trilogy.