Smaug is here, and he's not best pleased. He's also not in the best possible light, with his particular brand of hot halitosis covering his modesty. But to make up for it, at least you can hear Benedict Cumberbatch's best wyrm tongue in the new trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug. Top tip: get your headphones on and crank up the volume.
It's a well cut trailer with some great "Leggy moments" (as Orlando Bloom calls them) as well as a gas refinery's worth of explosions and tonnes and tonnes of golden coin. Luke Evans' Bard The Bowman also gets his chance to shine - though perhaps not as brightly as the aforementioned gold - and there's even time for a few comic beats in there too, thanks to Bilbo and Gandalf.
There's still no Stephen Fry as the grotesque master of Lake-town, and effectively no Beorn to boot, but that's all well and good - they can't go about revealing everything so early on (though a smidge more Smaug would be nice).
The question is, then, can you do a decent version of Smaug's voice? Failing that, can you even pronounce Smaug properly? Our current in-office attempts to do Cumberbatch's dragony drawl sound like Sherlock doing a Bane impersonation, so perhaps a little more practice is needed.{The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug}
With the first film's team returning and Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Aidan Turner, Billy Connolly, Graham McTavish, Dean O’Gorman, Mikael Persbrandt, Conan Stevens and that Cumberbatch fellow also in the cast, The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug is out on December 13.