Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

Good morning, world. I'm going to use the same first paragraph on each of the stories I post this morning, because I want to make sure it's read by as many visitors to the site as possible this morning. In everyone's rush to view the Oscars, the Independent Spirit Awards got overlooked, as usual, and I want to send all congratulations out to such worthy winners as Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek, Chris Nolan and Carrie-Anne Moss, Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff and Steve Buscemi, and MEMENTO and AMELIE. That's not to slight the remarkable accomplishment of Halle Berry and Denzel Washington last night, but simply to recognize that a lot of worthy people picked up awards this weekend, and there's more than one game in town.

So the strangest thing just happened to me.

I'm sitting here in the Labs, post-Oscars, having just run my guests home, and I'm getting ready to make a few notes on things and go to bed when there was a sound... a shuddering, like a great wind rushing through the room... and papers blew up in a flurry all around me. I jumped up and began to snatch them out of the air, pausing, my task forgotten, as I saw Gandalf The White standing in the doorway.

He held out his hand, and there in his palm, I saw the Palantir, and in the depths of that glass sphere, I saw something familiar. I leaned closer. Yes... it was the last few moments of FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. There's Sam... there's Frodo... there's the distant fires of Mount Doom.

I looked up at Gandalf, afraid to ask him anything. He's much more imposing in person, keep in mind. "Ummm... this is very nice," I said, smiling as broadly as I could, "but I actually saw this already a few times..."

The fire I saw in his eyes, the fire that had burned away his old persona at the bottom of some forgotten pit of Moria, caused me to cringe back a bit, afraid I had offended him. When he spoke, though, it was with a deceptive sort of quiet, a hush. "Keep watching," he said.

So I looked again, and I saw the last shot of the film fade to black, and the first of the end titles came up...

... only it didn't. It wasn't the first of the end titles. The screen said "Coming this Christmas," and a sudden electric shock ran down my spine as I realized what Gandalf was showing me. "The journey continues" came up, then gave way to a shot of a pin lying in the grass, shaped like a leaf. Someone leaned in, picked it up, and the camera TILTS UP to the face of Aragorn.

And as soon as you see those shots of Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas on the hunt for Merry and Pippin, you know that everything you liked about FELLOWSHIP is going to be back this time around. Andrew Lesnie's Academy-Award winning cinematography is just as grand and sweeping this time out. The first few images show us the search for Merry and Pippin, but quickly, we are reintroduced to Gandalf The White in an image that should give you some idea of what I encountered here in the Labs tonight, a powerful wizard, bristling with barely restrained might. This is not the frail old man of the first film; not at all.

The dialogue flew past, and I wasn't prepared to write it all down. "So... Gandalf Grayhaven believes he has found the Lost King Of Gondor," muses Saruman, even as Gandalf speaks directly to Isildur's conflicted heir. "Sauron is not yet so powerful that he is without fear. He fears you, Aragorn. He fears what you may become." There are shots here hinting at the future of Aragorn, at the destiny that is his to claim, and the trailer just keeps ramping up, building steam.

We see Sam and Frodo in the Dead Marshes. "The Ring..." says Frodo. "It grows heavier." Galadriel speaks to someone, pain on her face: "Frodo will not survive this task."

And then it's just one shot right after another, and we're getting our first looks at the characters. We're seeing Theoden and Grima Wormtongue (dear god, Brad Dourif looks perfect) and Faramir and Eowyn, and then two particularly striking shots of Arwen laid out as if dead, and at this point, the images just race by, and we're seeing landscapes and that glorious Howard Shore score just keeps building, and every single frame of Helm's Deep is intense, foreboding, with a couple of battle shots that will make your jaw drop (the ladders being thrown up against the wall and knocked away just as fast while sheets of arrows volley back and forth), and then, HOLY SHIT WAS THAT TREEBEARD?! And even more shots flash by, and wait a minute, was that four minutes? How can that already be four minutes? I WANT MORE!! I WANT MORE!! I WANT...

... and then those last few shots creep up on you, Gollum creeping down the side of the mountain towards the sleeping Sam and Frodo, hissing under his breath about "the cursed hobbitsesss... cursed thievessssss..." and just as he's reaching out for the Ring, Frodo opens his eyes, and...

... Gandalf snatched the Palantir away from me. I cried out and reached for it, but he shook his head. "Greedy boy, I have others to show this to, and far to travel still tonight."

"Just one more time," I begged, but this only made him laugh, and then I could see the old Gandalf in there, behind those kind eyes.

"It will be in theaters on Friday," he said, "in over 40 different international markets. It will be the same trailer worldwide, all four minutes of it, and New Line is working some magic of their own just to have it ready. It will be there on March 29, and you can see it to your heart's content then. In the meantime, maybe Harry or Quint can fill in some details you missed."

I wanted to ask him if he was on his way to Austin, or if he'd already been, but by that point he was gone, and I found myself here, typing frantically. I hope Gandalf appears for these other guys tonight, because I'm on sensory overload trying to describe what I saw. Maybe they can tell you what Theoden says. Hell, I think the scene in the trailer is the scene Harry was there to watch them film with Bernard Hill. All I know is, as a LOTR fan, I was very pleased by what I saw and heard. Fans around the world are getting a love letter this Friday, cut by Jackson himself, and it doesn't feel like any normal trailer. It feels like a promise: "In December, we're going to do it again."

And ya know what?

I believe him.