The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug really ought to be a pretty simple sell for Peter Jackson and his amiable band of Kiwi storytellers. If you liked part one, and managed to get through the whole thing without pointing continually at the screen and shouting, "That wasn't in the book!"; if you didn't find yourself feeling an enormous sense of anticlimax when An Unexpected Journey finished before Bilbo Baggins and pals had even entered bloomin' Mirkwood, and if you could ignore the over-the-top flavour of lingering portentousness which hung weirdly over what ought to have been a rather merry affair – well then, you're probably going to enjoy this one just as much.
Personally, I've got my head round the liberal tinkering that Jackson has made with this prequel to The Lord of the Rings by imagining the whole thing as an expensive fantasy TV miniseries that just happens to be showing on the big screen. Such deliberate myopia is made easier when watching Game of Thrones, HBO's adaptation of George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice, which is beginning to mess with its source so furiously that it makes Jackson's Hobbit look positively saintly by comparison. If HBO ever makes a small-screen version of Tolkien's tome, it would be little surprise if Aragorn turned up to rescue Bilbo from the clutches of Gollum and the 13 dwarves were combined into just three.
If, however, you are in the anti-Jackson camp, the debut trailer for The Desolation of Smaug ought to give you plenty of material for derision. The last time I leafed through my knackered old copy of The Hobbit, I'm pretty sure that Kate from Lost wasn't in it. But yet there Evangeline Lilly is, taking the wise she-elf baton from LOTR's Arwen, and apparently known as Tauriel. Hanging out with her is Orlando Bloom's silken-tressed Legolas, who I'd always thought of as a Lord of the Rings character, but who was apparently in The Hobbit too. Fair enough, as the wood elf would have been around at the time of the earlier book's events. But why bring back villainous white orc Azog, whom Tolkien barely mentioned, when Jackson presumably only parachuted him into An Unexpected Journey in order to provide a suitable climactic spat? Likewise Legolas's dad, Thranduil (Lee Pace), seems to have been considerably expanded in comparison with Tolkien's story. In fact I'm pretty sure he says more in the teaser for The Desolation of Smaug than he did in the entirety of the book. Speaking of which, Luke Evans's Bard the Bowman turns up here to signal that he's more than just an accurate shot in Jackson's version of the tale.
For those of us determined to enjoy this second instalment despite ourselves, there is some solace in the fact that Jackson's vision of Middle-earth has never looked better than in these new films. The CGI in the new teaser is sharper, the New Zealand scenery somehow crisper and brighter (even when not watching in a zillion frames per second), the costume design unequalled. And while we don't get to see much of Martin Freeman's Bilbo in the new promo, he makes a stupendous Baggins: truly an everyhobbit for the ages. The trailer itself, meanwhile, culminates with our first glimpse of Smaug himself, as voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. Since the British actor also plays the Necromancer, does that mean his two roles will both feature in the middle Hobbit movie? We don't get to hear Cumberbatch's vocal interpretation just yet, but Jackson stays true to his word: it's dark inside the lonely mountain, but there's no snub simian mouth to be seen.
I can't be the only one who's wondering quite what will be left of The Hobbit for part three once The Desolation of Smaug is done, however. If the second Hobbit film climaxes with all the dragony stuff, then pretty much the whole of There and Back Again is going to be the Battle of Five Armies. Jackson doesn't even have a Scouring of the Shire (the final, unfilmed part of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings) to fall back on this time around.
If he gets stuck for extra padding material, perhaps Kate can help out. I'm thinking Sawyer and Hurley as the fourth and fifth members of the Istari order of wizards, who Tolkien said disappeared into the far east of Middle-earth and are hardly mentioned in the books. Or perhaps Sun and Jin could step into the radically expanded roles of cutlery-thieving Lobelia and Lotho Sackville-Baggins for Bilbo's triumphant return to the Shire? Really, when Jackson's gone this far already, what's to stop him?
