Hobbit: Into the Fire, The

RangerKris successfully strips this film of it’s over the top antics and gratuitous violence. Center stage is the hobbit for which the story is named. Smaug is no longer part of a series of cut-rate and beatable video game bosses–he is the greatest of calamities. A delight to watch, Into the Fire is the masterfully edited story rescued from The Desolation of Smaug.

Thank you RangerKris.

This fan edit does everything right: it cuts out a ton of padding and unwanted subplots, it's got excellent audio and video quality throughout, and it tells a coherent, well-paced story. Yet, despite that, I still found myself as bored and frustrated as I had been with the theatrical cut.

The problem is not with the editor, it's with Peter Jackson. And having seen this edit - that cuts out nearly an hour from the original movie - I've concluded that Desolation of Smaug is beyond saving. There is one very simple reason for this: Jackson misguidedly sought to replicate the tone of his Lord of the Rings trilogy instead of replicating the tone of the book.

Whereas the Lord of the Rings novels had end-of-the-world stakes upon which an increasingly dire, dramatic tone was appropriate, in the case of The Hobbit it's completely inappropriate. The Hobbit story just isn't grand enough and the stakes aren't high enough, and so it all becomes a total drag. Worse, the whimsical and funny charm of the book has been almost entirely abandoned, when it should have been front and centre.

The Hobbit should have been a short, fun adventure starring Bilbo Baggins. What we've got instead has been a deathly long melodrama starring Thorin Oakenshield, with Bilbo as one of his sidekicks.

That said, if you liked the original cut of DOS but considered it a bit on the long side you'll love this edit. It's as good as this film is ever likely to get.

My wife and I watched your work yesterday night on the big screen, and all I can say is THANK YOU! She wouldn't even go see D.O.S. in the theaters because she'd been so disappointed after watching AUJ. But the work you did chopping it down and focusing the narrative made an amazing difference. We could really FEEL the story of the Bilbo (instead of just cursing PJ every two minutes). Also a special thank you for all the technical work you put into your edit. I know most of what you do is "invisible" to others, but all that time, care and craft makes a massive difference when folks like me sit down to lose ourselves in a lovingly crafted return to middle-earth.

"Bilbo...his name is Bilbo."
Peter Jackson seems to have had the same problem as Thorin - forgot who the main character is. Into the Fire takes us back to Bilbo Baggins and his story, it's that simple.

RangerKris, I thank you again for your undertaking. It has given me a Hobbit movie that satisfies my need for a true to Tolkien experience. I appreciate how open you were to suggestions on the discussion board during the editing process, allowing everyone to chime in on what a purist version would be. The visual and audio editing was excellent as usual. I will be watching the final Hobbit installment with much more ease, knowing that however packed full of over the top, extraneous material, I will have hope for a purely Tolkien ending.

P.S. Maia Sauron was pulled off masterfully!

Another brilliant edit by RangerKris.
I was waiting for this one since I saw ranger's first edit (Fire of the Dragon) which I thought was excellent, but this is even better.
Technically the Audio / Video quality is excellent, the encoding is very good, color rendering and motion estimation and detection is very good, no blurring, no jerkiness or pixelation of any sort
Visual editing, you just would not know that this was an edit, seamless transitions that flow naturally. Same goes for for the audio.
I deducted one point from the audio editing and audio quality because I wish ranger would do a 5.1 surround sound. It makes watching on a big screen with a sound system a bit more enjoyable.

The narrative is excellent. fast and focused with no distraction or side tracks. If you showed this film to some one who has not seen the original theatrical cut, they would never now there was something missing, the only negative thing that can be said is the missing dwarves that were left in lake town; but this is not Ranger's fault, the material to fix that is simply not there; even that little drawback is mostly not noticeable, you have to be really pedantic and nitpicking and do a head count to notice it.
For diehard Tolkien fans this edit is god sent to save us from the excesses of PJ.
When it came to Enjoyment, I decide to watch all three versions back to back, the original, Fire of the Dragon and Into The Fire; I can tell you right now, the original fell down immediately, I just could not finish it, it was a 2 horse race and Into the Fire came ahead just by a nose ;)
I would recommend this edit to any Tolkien fan, and to any one who has even never heard of Tolkien or the Hobbit, it is just a very good and entertaining movie.
I hope that Ranger would tackle unexpected journey and produce a purist edit out of it, and when Battle of the Five Armies comes out, that he would take all three parts and produce one coherent smooth movie out of them.