It depends on your point of view. Even with the length of the extended editions, content still had to be cut from the LOTR films, with characters and events condensed, or re-arranged. So you didn't get everything in the books.

For The Hobbit, you're getting nearly everything in the book, and more. They're able to expand the story and include things mentioned in the LOTR appendices that happened during the same time as The Hobbit, but Tolkien didn't conceive of until after the book. Expanding a story for a movie is something that happens all the time with short story adaptations.

I think more than just doing a simple a-to-b comparison between The Hobbit and LOTR book lengths, it's more important to consider the trilogies on their own merits. If a film feels well paced, it doesn't matter if it expanded on the source material, and if it feels padded and slow, it doesn't matter if it trimmed down the source material. The end results matter more than the means.

So now you're ok with the length?

He may have taken a deep breath, relaxed and realized it wasn't that long after all?

I'm confused. As fuck.

Warner Bros. and Google have joined forces and made a map of Middle Earth:

http://www.avclub.com/article/explor...review:1efault

http://middle-earth.thehobbit.com/map

<iframe width="853" height="480" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/BVvMGD8LNL0?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

There's one on the first page of the novel, love or hate Tolkien, I think his sheer detail in creating Middle Earth was pretty amazing.

Map is all wrong, Bree is west of Weathertop, and the Gap of Rohan is all wrong.

crap/10...would not bang

really?

In my copy, yeah.

Putting Smaug on an airplane is pretty clever.

They should do a full body shot of Smaug on an airplane, and make the background sky blue instead of white to blend in with the sky. Then when its up in the air, it will really look a dragon.

It would look pretty badass going down in a fiery crash!

I expected Smaug to be red. He sorta looked reddish in the first movie and even in the first trailer for the second movie. I'm surprised by how little red there actually is on him.

When I was a kid I imagined him as green because that was the stereotype of dragons I had in my head, doesn't Tolkien actually describe him in the book as being red or brown?

I don't know about the description in the book, but Tolkien actually created a watercolor where Smaug is red. See the picture on the Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smaug

From An Unexpected Journey, I got the impression he was colored similar to an oil slick. Depending on the light and the angle he looked anywhere from red to green to bluish.

That's interesting. One would think they would've gone with what the author actually had in mind.

There are shots/key art from the film that show him as red. For example, see lower on the Wikipedia page.

Also there's this key art promo image from August:
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2013...ey-art-poster/

It's possible the airplane image is off, or that it's the interior light reflecting off all the gold that gives Smaug the reddish hue.

They did deviate from the Tolkien illustration in terms of scale though, both the dragon and the hoard of gold.

This was the thought process on the color of a previous cinematic dragon:An enlightening read on the struggles and triumphs of bringing Vermithrax Pejorative to life on the big screen.

Yes, the poster does show it with red. I was looking at the sneak peak trailer and a shot of his eye doesn't show red (but it is very brief) there's a fleeting shot of part of his body (I think) and I can see red.

Great flick, Tor Thorsen of the late, lamented reel.com used to refer to Dragonslayer as one of the few genuine sword-and-sorcery/high-fantasy style flicks, along with Conan and Exaclibur. Sadly, no extras on the DVD and no Blu-Ray release likely.

We're only looking at promo images and very brief shots in the trailer, my assumption was that the major reason we didn't see him in An Unexpected Journey was because the CG wasn't finished. Once upon a time, the trailers wouldn't have revealed him at all, and even in this case, they seem to be trying to show him as little as possible. I'm sure under the various conditions we'll seem him in the movie, he'll look different.

Are you sure about that? The trailers for the aforementioned Dragonslayer from 1981 shows glimpses of their dragon:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pl18A-Me_0


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHJ-gZUqD2o

From The Hobbit: "There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light. Smaug lay, with wings folded like an immeasurable bat, turned partly on one side, so that the hobbit could see his underparts and his long pale belly crusted with gems and fragments of gold from his long lying on his costly bed."

I think they based Smaug's appearance on an Alan Lee painting.

Sidenote: Tolkien goes into more detail about his vision for dragons in "Children of Hurin" (which is, IMO, the most moving, adult and affecting thing he ever wrote). The dragon Glaurung is one of the primary antagonists in that book. Glaurung is one of Morgoth's chief Captains, he's very wise and truly evil. (Morgoth is Tolkien's ultimate bad guy, Sauron's boss and basically the Devil). Glaurung is Sauron-like in his wisdom, ability to foresee, maze-like deceptions and ability to incite chaos. He is easily a match for an Istari like Gandalf, extremely powerful magically and in command of a vast army. Physically, he can easily destroy an entire city many times the size of the Lonely Mountain himself. He's nothing like the animal-like Fell Beasts that the Nazgul ride. Smaug likely isn't as powerful as Glaurung, but he's in the ballpark. In short, dragons are a really, really big deal in Tolkien's legendarium.

I just finished reading The Children of Húrin and must agree with everything you posted. I'd say Glaurung was even more dangerous than Sauron, given how intricately he manipulated all events to go according to plan Reading that book really gives more insight into why the movie version of Gandalf would be so concerned with there still being a living dragon in Middle Earth.