Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, has released a teaser trailer for the first part of his new film project - The Hobbit - the prequel to the Trilogy: he has planned two movies. However, the bad news is: we will have to wait for a year for it: the first of the two movies, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, does not open until the 14th December 2012 - God help us we all could be dead! I presume, as with the Trilogy, he is shooting both movies back to back, so we may get the second movie in the summer of 2013 (this gets worse!), or he could stretch it out until Christmas 2013.
I am embedding the trailer for you. As fans will see very quickly, Jackson is using the same sets and some of the same actors - so it will be familiar to us all. Martin Freeman is playing the young Bilbo - a good actor, so I think it will pull it off; and Andy Serkis is back in the role of Gollum. The lovely Cate Blanchette will also be popping back into her role as Galadriel. And then there's a whole pile of dwarfs, and I presume there will be a dragon in there too (I wonder who will play that - I can think of a few candidates....).
For those of you who do not know The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (very few I'd say), they are very Catholic works. The author J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic with a wide and expansive Catholic imagination. He is a wonderful antidote to an awful almost Puritan seriousness which seems common among some in the faith today. Tolkien teaches us that to be Catholic, to be truly Catholic, is to have a great sense of humour (a la Chesterton), a great cultural openness, and a child-like imagination where one realises that all sorts of wonderful things are possible.
The trailer:
No matter what the Christian messages it may impart, I could never enjoy fantasy novels. My son read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings at eight (for the first time) and is a great appreciator of (and evangelist for!) Tolkien. I think they are tales for the male imagination, in general. I do think they inspire and lead people (generally men and boys) to the good, like all good parables.
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