Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Edits, The

Compliments to Stromboli Bones and all who helped on the project!

A great edit, no doubt!
It is very well done following the adventurous narrative of Bilbo Baggins and the group.
Revealing the story as it goes by, step by step, as for example Azog being introduced later in the movie, instead in beggining of the journey as a story or flashbacks.
Cutting out all of Dol Guldur and side stories was the best choice from my point of view!

I have to say the 5 parts edition suprised me big, when I saw how those were made!
In the end of pt. 2 thou after being saved by the eagles on the cliff, then in the next scene Bilbo seeing Azog scouting party again is very
sudden. Would love to see a transaction scene going down the mountain or what ever can be filled!? If possible

An honorable mention is the 5.1 audio and the enhancement on Thorin's voice under the 'Dragon sickness'!

Overall A great project! Truly enjoyable for watching the pure adventure of Bilbo Baggins!

It comes in 5 parts or "episodes", each about an hour long, with the final one being a little over an hour. I have seen the originals/theatrical cuts so I know much of what was cut. Bones was able to cut out all the bloat extremely well and in a completely unnoticeable way. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone wanting to watch these films for the first time or as an alternative. The plot makes perfect sense with all the cuts and nothing felt off or strange. Fantastic job all around.

Marvelous... stupendous... magnificent! A great idea to combine the creativity of many minds, and congrats for the hard work to make it happen. The theatrical version was a bloated mess; this edit tells a full and satisfying story. I finally understand all of the character motivations, I appreciate more of what Peter Jackson was trying to do in some areas and I was engaged throughout all 5 parts.

When I watch LOTR, it's a perfect ending but I still don't want it to end. I had this same feeling when the Hobbit finished. Well done!

Not much of a poster but saw that I hadn’t reviewed this when I thought I had. This edit is UNREAL! Flawlessly combined and very solid format to break it into 5 episodes. Narrative was clear and I was delightfully surprised how much was edited but how much better it was. Very impressive and definitely how I will watch the hobbit from here on out. Highly recommend.

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.