Review Detail

My biggest thought after watching this edit was, "I thought this was supposed to be JRR Tolkein's The Hobbit?" I don't really feel that it's fair to title this edit in such a way when it's nowhere near a book cut. I still had to watch the Elven/Goblin fight during the barrel sequence, the dwarves still ran around with Smaug inside the mountain, Bard still shot the arrow off of his son's shoulder, and we watched the whole finale unfold between Thorin and Azog. It'd be one thing if there were just no good way to cut these things out, but they have all been skillfully taken care of in various other edits. This is absolutely a better film than the theatrical trilogy, but it falls short as a book cut, which is what I expected given the title.

Finally, I thought it was odd the massive amount of effort that went into all of the formats and subtitles available for this edit, yet they lazily copied and pasted the credits from The Battle of the Five Armies? Not only are there names of actors and characters who never appear in the film, there are drawings of them! I've heard time and again that the goal with fanedits is for them to feel like theatrical releases. When the end credits started rolling and a bunch of faces popped up that weren't in the film, it definitely screamed fanedit to me.

I apologize for the harsh review, but I have to disagree with the general consensus here--they put a lot of effort into this one, to be sure, but it fell short in a lot of ways for me, unfortunately.