Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - Arkenstone Edition, The

Straight from the forum:

After having read through the thread and watching the edit, I don't have much to add but my own thanks for such a fantastic rework of the film. The pacing is far better than the original, the themes more consistent and less heavy-handed, the score fluid and engaging. There was perhaps one awkward cut during the White Council meeting, but if I hadn't known it was an edited version of the film, I likely wouldn't have noticed. Perhaps it's my audio setup, but I didn't have any issues with dialog volumes. I really appreciate your take on the overuse of CGI (i.e. best to be left on the cutting room floor), as it's becoming a worse and worse part of the series. I'm already looking forward to your take on DoS, if only to have that damn barrel scene fixed.

It's still The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I personally enjoyed the theatrical cut, approaching the film as the light-hearted adventure it's supposed to be and I appreciated all the content, but I was aware that there's simply too much of it and very little of it justifies the extended running time. Even with this edit, AUJ remains relatively exposition-heavy - which is understandable since it's the first entry in this trilogy - with fairly shallow characterization and a simple plot to boot. But Kerr managed to just tighten everything up overall whilst having little to no impact on the original, light-hearted adventure vision for the film.

The opening section where Bilbo is convinced to join the company feels just about right now in
terms of length. Azog becomes a more ominous, dangerous villain by reducing his dialogue and
screen time. Radagast's shorter, quicker introduction works well, although it's a little abrupt IMO. The trimmed troll and Warg chase sequences remove absolutely nothing of consequence based on the fact I noticed 0% of the changes whilst they remained fully fleshed-out sections of action. Their pit-stop in Rivendell drags down the pacing a little less, and the closing goblin cave segment is much less indulgent. Kerr has simply made AUJ a better film on every level, although I personally don't agree with cutting the stone giants (more so because the company's climb along the stormy mountain now feels a little on the short side rather than actually missing the giants, no matter how grand or entertaining they are), trimming the goblin caves to the extent that there's barely any fighting and you don't even see the goblin king killed, or cutting the shot of the dwarves falling into the goblin cave in dramatic fashion. Nonetheless, it's a huge pacing improvement on the original film, and while it's still not a masterpiece this will certainly be my go-to version of AUJ from now on.

Video and sound quality is excellent for the MP4 release and the editing is flawless, with only a
handful of slightly noticable transitions throughout the 140 minute run time. Video editing is pretty much unnoticeable and the sound work is similarly excellent, save for some times where the music seems a bit over-loud compared to the dialogue or when the sound recreation falls a bit flat in the reworked climax. My hats off to Kerr nonetheless for making such a smoothly extensive edit that remains true to the original intentions of The Hobbit, and I'm looking forward to seeing if he does the same with The Desolation of Smaug and There and Back Again.

When I saw AUJ in theaters, I remember how I felt every single minute of the three hour running time. I came in cautiously optimistic - sure, I thought, the unnecessary division of the book into a trilogy will inevitably result in some filler, but how bad could it be?

Well I walked out of that theater marveling at how little had happened in spite of so much running around and action. At the end of three hours, we have gotten the counsel of Elrond regarding the door to Erebor, gotten the sense that Sauron is returning, found the ring..... and that's it. Oh! Yeah, Thorin became bros with Bilbo. Whew, glad that entirely predictable movie lengthening plot thread got resolved.

Yes, AUJ, in its theatrical form, was a massive disappointment. Now, onto the fan edit.

To speak in generalities, it is, first and foremost, wonderfully edited. The video editing is nearly flawless. It could have been shown in theaters this way. You don't feel like this is anything other than how the film was originally cut. I do saw nearly flawless. There is added film grain in the beginning to allow intercutting with material from LOTR. This makes the picture a bit less crisp and is a bit of a distraction, but that is really, really being a nitpick about it. The image quality of the blu-ray release was excellent, more than worth the additional size of the file.

A major effort in this fan edit was sound editing, and I have to say, it is hardly detectable that anyone altered the audio. The audio is mixed very, very well. I only vaguely remembered that in theaters, the movie used a lot of music from LOTR, whereas it is not in play here much. And I didn't mind, the new music fit quite well, and seemed totally in place. The only issue was during the final showdown with Azog, the vocals seemed a bit muted. Speaking of Azog...

Yes, he is still in this movie. That was one of the things that annoyed me the most about the theatrical cut. But he at least seems to be in it less, or is mentioned less, or something, because I remember in theaters they had a running question as to whether Azog was in fact behind everything (SPOILER: Yes of course he is). Here, it's taken for granted he is, as he obviously is. He's still generic, entirely unnecessary, and boring, but I can understand that it was probably difficult to remove him entirely without losing the final scene of them looking toward Erebor, as well as the reason to have them constantly bothered by orcs and wargs on the way.

The pace is much improved, and I found myself actually enjoying the progression of events more than I had in the theater. Over 40 minutes were cut, but you honestly don't miss anything left on the cutting room floor. The introduction being changed from a letter to Frodo to being the beginning of Bilbo writing the Hobbit was an interesting one. I personally didn't mind seeing Frodo pop up for a minute, but with him gone, the introduction is shorter, and that helps the pacing. That awful kitchen song is gone, the dwarf antics in Bilbo's house reduced, but with the wonderful Misty Mountain song retained, making the first act much less bloated, slow, and buffoonish. The solemnity is much better appreciated when it isn't book-ended with dwarves throwing around silverware.

Another edit for which I am grateful is the reduction of Radagast to the bare minimum. He was only in the film to inform us of the return of the Necromancer, and then quickly disappear on his stupid rabbit sled. I appreciated the extra breathing room in Rivendell, as well as the trimming of the White Council. No more cringe-worthy jokes about Radagast being on mushrooms, just quickly getting it over with. I still don't see much point for having the White Council, or Radagast at all, but I understand the editor was being conservative in his cuts to ensure continuity with the Desolation of Smaug. On those grounds I don't mind much, as they are much reduced, and far less painful.

The troll scene was still dumb, but it felt a bit shorter, and by the point they show up, we're a good 20 some minutes ahead of where we would have been in the theatrical cut, so I wasn't nearly as worn down from boredom, and thus coped with them better.

The best editing by far was the elimination of the majority of the Goblin King. Instead of constantly cutting away from the wonderful Riddles in the Dark sequence to the bland escape from the orcs, with all its groan-worthy comedic moments, we just see the troupe being captured, the Goblin King tormenting them a bit, and then Gandalf breaking in and admonishing them to fight. That's it. The next we see them they're out the door and down the mountain. This cut wisely focuses on Gollum, trusting us enough to be content with the knowledge that they fought their way out.

The showdown finale is still a rather clumsily inserted artificial conclusion, but that really can't be helped.

This was a masterfully done fan edit. It was a bit conservative; I could imagine another 15 or 20 minutes could have been cut fairly painlessly, and maybe even another 40 minutes if you were willing to suffer from less even transitions and continuity errors, but that's neither here or there. The film is still no masterpiece - the dwarves are still largely bland, the dialogue oddly wooden in places, the general "mock epic" atmosphere still present, but these are issues beyond the saving of editing. To address this, you would need to retroactively rewrite the screenplay, recast some of the dwarves, change the atmosphere, the pacing, or best of all, make only one film, not three. I would give the original version a 5/10, while I would give this a 7/10. Still not great, not even close to the LOTR trilogy, but much more bearable. The worst part of An Unexpected Journey was the film choking on its own excess, crawling through the entire running time, desperate to keep itself from getting very far in the story. When you remove 40 minutes of meandering, of awful songs, of B-rate action, you still end up in the same spot, but at least you were walking to the end instead of crawling.

I hope that this editor tries making a new fan edit once DOS is out on blu-ray, making one film of 3 hours from these two. With the extra material, and the quantum leap in plot progression we get in DOS, he would be able to very easily reduce the events of AUJ in the supercut to only an hour and a half, without making it seem so empty.

I don't think I can say much more than has already been said, so I'll just throw my hat in the "this edit was awesome" ring. Here's a quick rundown:

A/V quality:
Superb. One of my recent edits is roughly the same length, and fitting a movie this long on a BD-25 is like fitting a movie of similar length on a DVD-5: doable, but difficult to maintain a high quality. Kerr nailed it. I do wonder though: was this 1080 or 720? 720 is impressive enough, but if this disc was mastered in 1080, Kerr is something of a marvel.

Visual editing:
I have exactly nothing to mention on this front.

Audio editing:
Kerr's score replacement was ambitious, especially because it required a lot of sound effect reconstruction too. By and large it was incredibly well done, and I didn't notice any of the newly added effects. I took off two points because there were a few instances where the score was simply too loud. There was really only one or two instances of the dialogue being difficult to hear, but the majority of the time it just seemed a bit too overpowering. I understand that this is to help mask residue from the original score on the center channel, but it still took me out of it a bit here and there.

Narrative:
There were only a few bits that were taken out that I noticed, and really only one or two things that I actually missed: the "blunt the knives" song and some of the extra dwarf antics in Rivendell, but on the whole, I found this to be much better paced than the theatrical cut, and obviously moreso than the extended cut. I really enjoyed how the Goblin town segment was trimmed - the characters have a long journey ahead of them, and throwing them into something like this too early in the long arc of the narrative makes the remainder of the story a bit tiring if it's one encounter after the other.

Having also watched Menbailee's edit, there was one thing I wish that Kerr had done here that Menbailee did: removing the dwarfs storming the troll camp. I thought it was a brilliant cut to show them charging into the camp then cutting to them on the fire.

Enjoyment:
This will certainly be my go-to version of the film (at least until Kerr does he book cut in 2015). A few minor quibbles aside, this was exceptionally well done. Good work Kerr, keep it up!

Great stuff. There's not much to say, so my review will be brief.

I love LOTR, so I was there opening night for AUJ. I knew it wasn't going to be as good as LOTR, that wasn't possible. Like many, I found myself somewhat disappointed in the film (still love it, to be clear), mostly pacing and narrative wise. Let me just say that there's no disappointment in this edit. It's not a replacement for me (I'm still holding tight to my EE - I want as much Middle Earth as possible), but it is, most likely, the best possible version of the film. It's faster, it's not as jumbled - it's definitely more focused. I could go more in depth, but I think the easiest thing to say is look at the cutlist and understand that every change works and improves the movie.

I only have a couple of problems with the edit. First thing I noticed that was off was the shot of painting in Rivendell - color wise and because of the slow motion. Next, and last, was the audio in the final few scenes. The thing is, when the entire audio track was replaced, the music wasn't loud enough, and it felt somewhat empty. Also, some of the original music seeps through when there's dialogue, but that's not as big a deal.

Anyway, great, great edit.