One of the big arguments of Gandalf is that Smaug's power could be deadly if he decided to side with Mordor in the coming conflict.
Yet pic related somehow doesn't have anyone worried. These are giants the size of mountains that are literally completely immune to blade of bow of any kind and there are multiple of them.
How are THESE creatures not a much bigger threat than a single dragon?
They don't get involved in politics.
They sit around stoned all day
They don’t give a fuck about anything, Smaug could easily be corrupted beyond what he already is.
Maybe they are bound to those mountains and can't go rampaging around
Well they clearly do considering the only scene we see them in they are fighting over something among themselves. Whatever that something is can probably be effected by a billion orcs.
If these creatures have interests to protect, as I can only assume they do considering they're fighting, then they can be influenced.
Pretty clever. 8/10.
Hackson completely misinterpreted what the fuck was going on in that passage of the book
there are no rock giants
They just spend their time throwing rocks at each other.
Maybe, but as far as we know, not really.
They clearly give a fuck about something, or they wouldn't be fighting. Even the dumbest orc gives a fuck about food, fighting and grog.
Jackson is a shitter hack, news at 11
Does Smaug even mention or otherwise acknowledge Sauron or the Ring in books or movies? I don't remember.
While I doubt it, you can conclude that since you never see them anywhere ELSE, there is some lock on their movement of some form. It's not like you see these things roaming the plains of Rohan or anything.
On the other hand, even if their somehow limited, this is some incredibly dangerous living artillery and (based on how far their actual movement range is) they have at LEAST locked that valley down for Mordor.
I honestly don't remember (who the fuck re-watches the Hobbit movies anyway?). I think, THINK, Smaug once talks about a "golden trinket of far greater power" in like one line or something, but that could be in my head.
>If these creatures have interests to protect, as I can only assume they do considering they're fighting, then they can be influenced.
That's true and their true motives are clearly nefarious, but they weren't all evil and beyond says, they're just a throw away race inserted for story purposes.
pretty sure that those didnt exist in the books and if they did, they were much smaller or of unspecified size. Think of slightly bigger than man sized worms. They can still dig tunnels just fine.
The retard went completely crazy with these earth worms. I mean dude... if they were that big what would they eat all day? cmon man
I am completely open to Jackson just fucking this entire scene up, or adding it solely to the movie because there had been a while since anything exciting had happened.
It's still an eagles-tier plot hole IMO though considering how far out of his way Gandalf goes to argue that the dragon could side with the enemy.
The worms were the weirdest combination of overpowered and under-utilized. If these creatures were something the armies of orcs had control over, to the degree it's implied, why not use them to rape the enemy army apart.
It was a large infantry-based melee battle. Five or six worms could have torn the dwarf, elf and man-ranks apart with 0 casualties.
Why didn't they use smaug instead of the eagles to fly to mt doom?
Smaug's a nigger.
You could easily just wave it away by saying they were affected by direct sunlight like goblinoids and trollkind.
So then have them dig underground and assault Erabor that way. Or dig right under the dwarfs and make them fall through.
Or at least dig some nice tunnels that would allow the orcs to pop up in the middle of the dwarf ranks. But no, instead we just make a few tunnels far away and then fuck off.
they exist in the book. maybe there are creatures in a world, far beyond politics. they take excitement out of throwing rocks at each other.
smaug is corrupted and sadistic. things sauron could exploit. this rockthings are a pure and wild form of nature. nothing more and nothing less.
When Frodo is invis trying to steal the Arkenstone, Smaug wakes up says “there’s something about you. Something you carry, made of gold but far more precious” and precious kind of echoes in the golem way
frodo?
The entire battle was logistically fucked, this was the tiniest of oversights.
They can't fly and spew fire
Bilbao.
Bilboa Buggins
Bilbao Zedong
...
Because The Hobbit movies were SHIT
SHIT!
Gora eta
the bilbo cut isnt bad
>Bilbo had never seen or imagined anything of the kind. They were high up in a narrow place, with a dreadful fall into a dim valley at one side of them. There they were sheltering under a hanging rock for the night, and he lay beneath a blanket and shook from head to toe. When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang. Then came a wind and a rain, and the wind whipped the rain and the hail about in every direction, so that an overhanging rock was no protection at all. Soon they were getting drenched and their ponies were standing with their heads down and their tails between their legs, and some of them were whinnying with fright. They could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.
Maybe they're retarded.
¸Because director says so, niggeronut
its an allegory for thunder and lightning. Geez how come no one understands this.
no, it was the biggest wtf moment for me as well. If you have such giant worms at your disposal then you can just borrow underneath any army or base and completely obliterate it.
Same for Minas Tirith, why bother attacking it at all when you can just annihilate it from below.
Utter and complete shite. If this is indeed in the books (with the clear control that the evil forces have over them) then the books are broken too
Maybe they just really liked throwing rocks at each other.
>Smaug's power could be deadly if he decided to side with Mordor in the coming conflict
>taking hackson lore seriously
is this a deleted scene from ratatouille
Smaug is an intelligent being that can easily be bribed.
Is there any evidence the giants have anything close to human intelligence?
It's in the book dumbass
Obviously.
Orcs aren't really the peak of intellect either, and I'm pretty sure cave trolls are literally beasts, but that didn't stop Sauron from having a few of those in his arsenal.
Smaug is intelligent on a human/orc level and can be reasoned with, bargained with, bribed, killed etc.
From what we saw, the stone giants are non-communicative, and seem to have nothing to fight over, yet fight regardless. That puts their intelligence in a realm beyond our own. Not necessarilly higher, just different. They have nothing to gain or fear.
There is nothing the orcs could do to these creatures without the loss of millions of troops. One of these things could sweep the ground with its arm and kill 100,000 soldiers in seconds.
They were just in it to look cool.
wtf I just literally watched this scene 5 minutes ago
That sequence was in the book too
Except the mountain giants aren't some retarded looking stone elementals from Warcraft or something like that.
I actually think Smaug is quite a bit above human, and leagues above orc. He seems reflected and well spoken on most topics which at least statistically reflects intelligence.
If cave trolls, oliphaunts, warg and other beast-like intellect creatures could be convinced to fight for Mordor I don't feel that it's a strong enough argument that the mountain giants are an exception.
Their needs might be simple (like maybe they just want more rocks, or bigger rocks or a nice mountain-peak) but they have needs. And anything with a need can usually be persuaded or forced into submission one way or the other.
>Gandalf goes to argue that the dragon could side with the enemy.
Dragons are beasts of the enemy and generally bad guys. It's not hard to imagine Smaug siding with Morgoth's heir.
>why doesn't Sauron seduce the giant rocks
How do you talk to a mountain nigga?
Beasts can be trained as they understand task and reward. Dogs, lions, bears etc.
Mountains need nothing, want nothing, all they seem to do is fight. How would you train a mountain? Would you offer it a little bit of chicken to take time off from it's epic battles to march a thousand miles and squash another little fleshy insect? Maybe a bit of gold?
How do you communicate that concept to stone that neither talks nor hears?
to be fair the warcraft stone elementals look better
Is this not metaphorical? wtf jackson
I'm picturing the Warcraft 3 ones, I never touched WoW. Giant dudes made solemnly of stone aren't Mountain Giants.
We don't know that it does not talk or hear, that's just speculation. Who knows what tongues wizards/elves/other races have managed to learn?
We know that they're big, and that they fight, and like most creatures in nature they fight for a reason. Maybe it's to prove dominance, or maybe it's to decide who gets to pound their boulders against the female rock giants, but it's natural to assume there IS a reason.
And if there is reason they are like any other base animal, it can be manipulated and it can be reasoned with to a certain extent.
You don't really have to train it, you just have to show it that if it let's loose it's anger in a given general direction it gets a nice fat rock-whore or whatever it wants. Basic conditioning, and I don't see any reason these creatures should be above it.
Smaug is no doubt vastly intelligent compared to humans. But he has a level of awareness and sentience similar to humans and orcs. He has a concept of self, language, pleasure, fear etc.
Mountains don't even have mouths or ears or eyes, yet they can fight accurately, and possibly communicate. Getting Smaug on your side is like getting the Ents to fight. Tricky, but doable. Getting the mountains to fight for you would be like trying to convince the trees to pick up swords and march.
>Nature
Rules of nature dont apply to magical creatures. You're trying to align mountains with dogs.
like most other sentient things it probably fears the higher powers. gandalf is a servant of the heavens so he could probably convince one to do something (like blocking an orc tunnel, as suggested)
Sauron didn't have the APM to micro his diplomats on those stone giants while he was massing everything around the Mordor.
POLATICS! POLATICS!
We're making a lot of assumptions here.
Inaccuracy is the biggest fault, of course, as the one rock we see one of them throw hit's spot-on, so what evidence we're given shows that they're not terribly inaccurate.
Speech, and sight we can only guess at, but I will give you that we didn't see anything that looked like mouths or eyes so you might be right on that one, but considering the accuracy of the boulder-throwing mentioned above we can assume they have spacial awareness in some form. Maybe they hear well, or they are good at judging vibrations in the ground?
I agree that it'd probably not be EASY taming one, and you'd probably go through a few thousand trainers' lives before you'd manage it, but if you ever did it'd all be pretty much worth it I'd say.
We don't know their origin in terms of magic, or how many base instincts they have.
Exactly! And if Sauron, the lord of all darkness, conveys his will with accurate reward/fear I'm pretty sure he could make one go to war for him. And that'd be GG right there.
Lmao, wtf. Is he controlling the troll via his sword like a joystick? Hahaha.
This. The Maple Film cut is pretty good, actually.
The Stone GIants are not like they were in the shitty film. It was a fucking thunderstorm between the mountain pass making Bilbos imagination run wild.
fucking autismos
>Bilbo slips from ledge and catches it 3 times in a row
>Thorin goes to pull him up
>slips
>Being a fully-grown dragon, Smaug was both massive and powerful, possessing physical strength capable of crushing stone with ease
Those rock giants things were just so bullshit that Jackson invented but regardless would not have the capacity or the will to rally armies and wage wars against entire nations
Gandalf was concerned about Smaug because if he sided with Sauron he had the capacity to rule the entire north of middle earth. He wasnt just some piddly GOT Wyvern he was a full blown highly intelligent magic using colossal fire breathing flying tank who had already eradicated human and Dwarven kingdoms