I wasn't going to write anything about this trailer because it's been so well covered everywhere else. Everyone who has any interest in film has posted this trailer and has been talking about it, and no wonder it's the penultimate episode in the long journey into Tolkein's world by Peter Jackson and his team - a big budget, huge cast, amazing CG and very profitable journey too.

However what more could I add? Well I was going to write some derisory comment about the trailer but when I read what The Guardian had written I felt I had to mention it, after all it's as funny as it is truthful.

Before I leap into what they say, let's have a look at the trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second in the three films made from the single Hobbit book:

My first thoughts were, "ooh, 4K of black levels", but then that's unfair because I'm sure it's going to look fantastic on the big screen and they'll have their black levels calibrated a lot better than the YouTube footage…one would hope. Otherwise it's going to be a lot of nicely made darkness.

However it's what The Guardian wrote about the trailer that tickled me, and while I do think that Peter Jackson and his team have done amazing things with the whole series of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit book, I do agree with what's being said behind these lines.

One can just imagine the esteemed Oxford professor's horror after completing work on the 1937 book's final page, only to discover that he forgot to include Legolas, the silken-tressed elf princeling played by Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings. Imagine his pain when he realised he had also inexplicably failed to make room for a gorgeous lady elf romantic interest played by Kate from Lost. Consider his torment when it suddenly hit him that Bard the Bowman could really do with more than one line of dialogue. All these oversights and more are clearly going to be rectified in The Desolation of Smaug, if the second full trailer for Jackson's film is anything to go by.

Of course the extra material comes from elsewhere in J.R.R. Tolkein's work but I wonder how much isn't quite the way he had intended it and how much Jackson has added over and above his work?