Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Edits, The

I'm not a hardcore fan of Tolkien's universe. As such, I discovered it with The Lord of the Rings movies. I enjoyed them a lot, but I enjoyed their extended versions a lot more, IMO they benefited from the added scenes.

The Hobbit however, even in its theatrical version, was far too long as a 10-hours long trilogy. You don't need to know the original story was only one book to notice the Hobbit trilogy is bloated with unnecessary stuff.

Battle of the Five Edits reduces The Hobbit to a 5-hour long story divided in 5 chapters. Only the essential is left, the story is streamlined and much more enjoyable this way.

Technically speaking, it is flawless. I didn't notice any abrupt cut, whether in the video or the audio.

There are, however a couple of "weirdness's"
One : because the editor removed Tauriel entirely but left Kili being wounded with a poisoned arrow, we see him feeling very weak and nearly dying to suddenly feeling better a few minutes later. The thing is, it was necessary to leave the poison arrow in the edit to explain while Kili noisily fell down the stairs which alerted the nearby guards. Removing the arrow would have made Kili's sudden weakness equally weird, so there was no way to avoid this without leaving Tauriel in.

Two : in the story Gandalf comes and goes between the dwarves and his investigations. In this edit we don't see his investigations (the story is supposed to be about Bilbo after all), and because of the removed scenes in the last chapter he simply "reappears" a bit out of nowhere in front of Erebor in the middle of Thranduil's army. This felt a bit weird as I watched it, however to be objective, it's no different than him coming back to rescue the dwarves from the trolls in the nick of time. I used to wonder why Bilbo tells Gandalf "you come and go as you please" in Fellowship, at least now I know :p

After proofreading I realize: I spent more time talking about the negative than the positive, but the truth is these little weirdness's are the only "negative" things I had to say, and I'm using the word loosely.

Overall, the positive outweighs the negative by a huge margin and the editor deserves praise for his work, especially given the source material they had to work with.

Made the film's much more watchable. My brother's never been able to get through them but he enjoyed this miniseries

Amazing cut!

Watching three movies in one night especially three extended editions is absolutely never enjoyable if even possible but I did with this one and did not want to put it down.

This is simply the best way to enjoy The Hobbit.

The original movies contained many unnecessary scenes meant to add "excitement" or to include references to the Lord of the Rings movies. It made the movies overly long and frustrating to watch. This edit fixes all of this.

The story is now split into five parts, each around an hour long, essentially turning the trilogy into a miniseries. Stromboli Bones masterfully decied how to split the story; it almost feels as if this is how the story should have been told from the start. Each episode is seamlessly edited, the narrative flows well and much of the unnecessary scenes from the original movies have been cut without hindering the story. Splitting the story this way also makes it much easier to watch the whole thing over multiple sittings. It doesn't feel like such a huge undertaking to watch The Hobbit anymore, it's only five episodes! And it's good!

I strongly recommend this edit.