Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - Arkenstone Edition, The

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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.

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