When Peter Jackson announced that they were adding a purely original character to the second Hobbit film, he was met with a very mixed response: Hostility from Tolkien purists, ambivalence from almost everyone else. The problem she was created to solve is one inherit in the source material, though: It is completely devoid of women. Tolkien's novels regulated most of the female characters to subplots or appendices, with the exception of Eowyn in The Return of the King. That said, Tauriel's presence in The Desolation of Smaug is one of the most pleasant surprises about the latest Middle-Earth outing. While the trailers seemed to indicate her main subplot would be a romance with fan-favorite Legolas, the crux of her story turned out to be her interaction with one of the Dwarves, Kili. Peter Jackson and company seem very aware that turning this into a "love story" in the strictest sense could only end badly, so they use this developing (and ultimately doomed) relationship to explore the cultural and social disparities between the Elves and the Dwarves - differences mostly restricted to petty arguments and Sindarin cursing in the previous chapters. Evangeline Lily finds in this role a nice balance between the two extremes we have already seen in Elven women - complete detached mysticism, like Galadriel, and emotionally-fueled stress, like Arwen. Tauriel is detached enough to be believable as an equal to Legolas in combat, but open-hearted enough to befriend a dwarf.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
