Yes, Miranda Otto returns as Eowyn, narrating the story.
Correct. This movie takes place 178 years before the beginning of the War of the Ring and the story comes from the Return of the King appendices.
I was excited for Five Armies, and while I don't dislike it it's the weakest of Jackson's six films.
I found the lyrics posted online.
genius.com
Besides the actors, another point I want to bring up is production design. The design of Edoras and the Golden Hall of Meduseld is painstakingly recreated from the Jackson movies, and I assume that the same will be true of of the Hornburg / Helm's Deep.
There are fan edits that condense the whole trilogy into a single, albeit very long, film and there's one in particular that I largely love because it flows so well (the only real choppiness is the Beorn sequence but that's mostly because of how it is in the original film). The point being is I feel like the trilogy has a lot of unnecessary and easily ignorable bloat to the degree that I don't think I'll ever watch the originals again. Which is a funny contrast to my undying love for the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings.
I've been tempted to check out one of those fan edits for a while now, but there's so many of them with seemingly no real consensus on which does the best job; an unwillingness to sit though all of that more than once has led me to decision paralysis!
