I think most people who saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey would agree that it was overlong and a little too video gamey in some of the action scenes. Tolkein purists will object to the addition of Legolas… but they probably haven’t been on board with much about this trilogy (and some didn’t care for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for that matter).

Well, what we see here in this first trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug looks a bit like more of the same, but at least we’re past the slow, introductory bits and into the meat of the story, so perhaps it will be more fun. In any case, as a movie tech nerd, I’ll see it for the high frame rate, which I thought looked wonderful outside of some very brightly lit scenes (a shortcoming of the cameras Jackson used, not high frame rate as a technology, I think).

The film hits theaters on December 13th.