Hobbit: Into the Fire, The

This was pretty damn fantastic! To me, it proves that action/adventure spectacles can still be great, even if it's "just a 90-minute movie". The story moves at a fast pace and we don't get slogged down with people we don't care about. The Smaug finale is excellent, I loved it as a single flowing scene, and great visual editing there!

Highly recommended for anybody let down by The Hobbit Part B.

This edit is much better than the original version. Technically I did not notice any issues, the video quality is high and the audio is only 2 channel but also a high quality. The best part is how much of the movie has been cut but how little you notice the missing pieces.

I loved the LOTR trilogy but could never quite get into the books. However, The Hobbit is one of my favorite books of all time and I have been nothing but disappointed with the Hobbit films. They are overly long, filled with constant unnecessary reminders that these movies are prequels to the LOTR trilogy, and the films seem to forget that Bilbo is suppose to be the main character. Unfortunately some of those things still remain in this edit, which is why I had to take a few points off of enjoyability and narrative.

Nevertheless, this edit will be my official go to version for Desolation until someone creates a literary cut of all three Hobbit films. I highly recommend anyone who likes fantasy to check out this edit and to skip the theatrical cut all together.

This was my first experience with an edit of Desolation of Smaug. There were some great decisions made but other things didn't quite come together in execution. I'll break my review down into good elements and things that I was left with mixed feelings about:

The Good:

-Cutting most of the stuff with Bolg and Azog was a good move. It definitely helped to quicken the pace and shows how little the film needed these scenes.

-Cutting the Tauriel/Kili/Legolas love triangle. This was very effective. It felt largely shoehorned into the original film so nothing of value is lost here.

-Cutting the dwarves giving up and leaving. This was some pretty brilliant editing and a great change.

-The new intro: I liked it a lot. The original opening scene was hardly missed. That wide shot of the eagles makes for a great opening shot.

Mixed:

-Cutting the fight at Laketown: I always felt the Elves venturing to Laketown was largely unnecessary, but how its handled here is a bit of a mixed bag. The editing is mostly sound, but narratively it's a bit strange that some of the dwarves don't go to the mountain with no explanation given. This seemed like a large plot hole to me. We can clearly see that some of them are missing from the boat and later scenes at the mountain, but no explanation is given as to why they stay back. Also Kili's leg wound becomes a bit of a red herring.

- Bard stuff: I missed some of this. Particularly, the transition from Bard and the Dwarves to Stephen Fry up in his loft now feels rather abrupt as the connection of Alfrid is no longer there. In general, the Bard vs. Stephen Fry stuff feels like a vestige of the original film that you tried to minimize but couldn't completely cut, and ends up coming out as a half-baked non-sequitur.

-Gandalf's story: Moving the encounter with Sauron to earlier didn't work for me. It made this plotline seem even less connected to the rest of the film, and it felt like a false climax. The plotline was rendered an aside that begins and ends in the middle of the film. Frankly, since this is supposed to be a purist cut, I would have went all the way and cut this plotline entirely.

-Barrel Escape: I appreciate the desire to cut this down as it is an action scene that ultimately adds nothing to the plot, but the result is just a choppy and unengaging scene. I would have left this in rather than go with the cut you ended up with, which is essentially the Dwarves going down the waterfalls as the elves dispatch a couple of orcs in the background. The scale of the orc attack is not really felt and the edit doesn't feel smooth and seamless.

-No Golden Smaug: This is the main reason I choose to watch this edit over your "Fire of the Dragon" edit. This extended action sequence in the final act absolutely killed the pace of the movie for me. The editing is mostly handled well except for one thing: Silver Smaug. This essentially kills this aspect of the edit for me. I realize there aren't a lot of options here for an editor, but the change in color timing for the few shots of Smaug here is absolutely noticeable against the rest of the footage, and the change from gold to silver doesn't really make this scene suddenly make sense. This was a good idea that just didn't come together in execution.

Overall this edit was a mixed bag for me but I still appreciate the effort that went into it. You definitely have some editing talent so I'm looking forward to your future edits!

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.