Review Detail

Although the first movie offers the most material to work with (and two of the five episodes are thankfully dedicated to it), I’m still of a mind that there’s too much included here. I can do without the dish song for example. I’m biased as I believe the original movies don’t capture the tone of the Hobbit book but rather they feel more like the tone of a prequel to the LotR movies yet undermine that repeatedly with silliness and inconsistencies. As such, scenes like trolls, goblins, and dragons talking or spontaneously breaking into song while juggling dishes feels out of place in the movie. That said, if you can accept all that, the episodic nature of this edit works very well. Though Gandalf suddenly appearing out of nowhere to save the day near the climax of multiple episodes does stand out. And there’s things that I feel are narratively inconsistent. For example, I may be mistaken, but is there any reason given for the orc army to join the battle at the end? I watched this over two weeks and of course also have the prior knowledge of the movies, but I can’t recall that army being a significant part of the story at all up to this point.

Overall it works better than the movies for me, but it isn’t a home run. It’s somewhere between a LotR prequel and a book edit, though closer to the latter. I want my Hobbit edits to be closer to the former as I believe that is what the source material calls for. Though I admit it would be tough to make it totally consistent with LotR given the talking dragon, etc.

That said, it is clearly what many other Hobbit fans do want and it is flawlessly executed. I now really want a strong LotR prequel style edit that uses the same episodic nature. Though I still think four hours, max, is enough time.

This is a very strong edit, if not one that satisfies my issues with the source material.