Today we get a poster and tomorrow we get a trailer, it feels like Christmas!
I adore this poster. I think it does a great job of putting Bilbo in the perspective of the story Jackson is trying to tell. Throughout his Lord of the Rings adaptation and the first Hobbit film, Jackson has obsessively focused on how even the smallest person can play the most important role. In The Lord of the Rings we are constantly being reminded that the reason Frodo is the only one who carries the Ring is wholly centered on his normality and his pure wholesome goodness. He is the least likely to be corrupted by evil etc etc, that of course is a topic for another day.
This of course has carried over into last year’s installment of The Hobbit. Unlike the novel-Bilbo, movie-Bilbo needs to come to terms with the quest. The Hobbit movies aren’t an adaptation of the novel per-say, but the real story behind the novel. Jackson’s films present the novel as the watered down children’s story while their film is the grand epic war story… The “what really happened” story.
I wasn’t exactly fond of the title choice for the second movie: The Desolation Of Smaug… I thought it sounded pretentious and uncomfortably wordy. This poster changes my mind a little bit. The power and pure destruction that Smaug has brought down on the mountain and the surrounding landscape serves as a warning to Bilbo and our heroes, while the glow of the gold and the fire in the doorway promises them the adventure and the riches that they have been dreaming of. The golden doorway serves as a beckoning light to the audience as well. This is what we’ve all come to see: the dragon and we will see it in this film.
I liked the first Hobbit film. It had its problems, but at the end of the day, I still found it enjoyable.
So I await tomorrow with baited breath. Will we see Smaug in the new trailer or will Jackson and Co. pull a Jaws and only allude to their monster pay-off?
We’ll just have to wait and see.
