Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - Arkenstone Edition, The

Hope to see you work with "Desolation of Smaug" and "The Battle of the five armies", in separated or the 3 in one movie =)

Superb edit, nothing more to add, i've just loved this new vision of the Movie =) Hope to see you work on Desolation of Smaug (specially this one!!) and The battle of the Five Armies.

I greatly enjoyed this fanedit, it had been sitting waiting to be watched for a couple years for a number of personal reasons and today I finally decided to go ahead and watch it.

It is edited perfectly, everything is seamless. Superior skill is shown by Kerr. It being available in HD is most welcome.

Narrative wise, it provides a very lean and entertaining take compared to the bloated and honestly boring original cut.

Kudos!

I like the original AUJ. It was a very nice return to Middle-Earth, but lots of pacing issues, prequel-itis and plain odd stuff prevented this movie from becoming truly fantastic like The Lord of the Rings.

Kerr wanted to fix this and edited An Unexpected Journey to make it the beginning of the Middle-Earth saga instead of a direct prequel to The Lord of the Rings, cut all of the odd stuff and fixed the pacing issues.

The Audio/Video editing was flawless. I especially liked how Kerr reinstated Howard Shore's original music and replaced it with borrowed music from The Lord of the Rings. The color correction was also very nice. Even though the green hue never bothered me, the new picture looks better.

The narrative is fantastic. Personally, I would cut Old Bilbo and make the prologue as if Ian Holm voices a random narrator, with "In a hole in the ground..." Up to "...and all the comforts of home" transitioning over the "Good morning" scene. I would also keep Blunt the Knives and Bofur's song from the EE as they establish the dwarves' merryness, and keep some setups for the next films like some parts of the White Council, or more of Gandalf and Galadriel. But other than those preferences, what's been aimed has been achieved perfectly. Well done!

This movie really succeeds in being much better and fitting the next two movies, and I recommend it to ANYONE.

I would imagine I come to these movies in a somewhat unique way. I didn't grow up on the books and only read LOTR after having seen the movies and the EEs many times. I have never read the Hobbit or any other ancillary material, including the appendices for LOTR. With that, I would imagine I came to the theatrical version with a bit less baggage than typical fans of the book. Overall, I enjoyed the movie, but not as much as I had the LOTR movies. I purchased the EE when it was released and actually enjoyed that quite a bit more, though there were some additions I could do without. Most notably, any additions to the Goblin King section. I feel my enjoyment of the EE more than my initial theatrical experience is due, in part, to more familiarity with a large ensemble cast. The issues I initially had, ironically, are expanded in the EE, namely some slow, plodding sections and over-the-top silliness. Yet I enjoyed the EE more. Again, I feel this is because, with no prior exposure to most of these characters in my initial viewing, it took me a while to get to know them and care about them. I think this is why PJ made the Bag End scenes so long. Kerr's shortening to about 30 minutes certainly feels right now, but if this were my initial viewing, would I feel the same way? That's the tough thing about reviewing these fan edits; it's impossible to go in with a clean slate.

By far, for me, the biggest improvement is the cuts to the Goblin Kingdom scenes. Thank god the song is gone (the biggest problem I had with the EE). The chase scenes are so cartoonish and silly--like something from Sonic the Hedgehog--that the fact that Kerr completely removed them was a huge aspect of my enjoyment. Compounding the issue, these silly scenes were intercut with the Riddles in the Dark scene, the best part of the movie. It reminded me of the silliness of the Ewoks intercut with the Throne Room duel in RotJ. I would guess a lot of the silliness is in this movie to try to keep it more in line with the tone of the book (which, again, I haven't read). But I think it needed to be completely a children's story or completely in line with the LOTR trilogy. Kerr does about as good a job as I can imagine making it the latter.

It's impossible to say for sure if I would have enjoyed this version the best, had I seen it first. But it is now my go to version. I will need to grab the Blu Ray version as soon as possible!

One question I did have is where the video game sources were used. I didn't seen them referenced in the changes section.