Hobbit: The Spence Edit, The

Wow, I had been hoping someone would do this well and this version has knocked it out of the park. I hadn't read the changes in advance on purpose and as I was watching it I never felt like it had skipped anything of importance. Editing is amazing, quality is perfect, now I wish there was a way to see this edit in a cinema.

And with all the editing there are still plenty of scenes that are allowed to breath and take there time such as Bilbo's conversations with Gollom and Smaug, which could have been tempting to trim much more. Another key strengths of this edit is that it finally makes Thorin an interesting character for once because we can see his simple arc in a single sitting, rather than over 9 hours. My one small criticism is that I think Thorin fighting Azog could potentially have been trimmed a little more given that the film is over 3 hours at that point.

Brilliant job, my favourite fan edit of all time.

Simply amazing! I was planning on doing an edit of the 3 Hobbit movies into 1 but I have no reason to now. The Spence Edit is nearly perfect. I had my arms raised for most of the movie while saying "YES!".

There are only a few spots were the plot moves ahead leaving something to be desired from the story (Beorn/ponies, reclaiming treasure/giving Bilbo mail, Thorin coming to his senses) but those edits made the pace stronger...and keep the runtime down so I'm not complaining.

I'll be putting this version on at any future Hobbit/LotR marathons I attend.

Like many people, I'm a huge fan of LotR but I found The Hobbit movies a bit of a chore. The third movie, especially, wasn't much more than an exercise in not walking out. I'd re-watched An Unexpected Journey once on Blu Ray, just to check out fancy HD visuals, and the others were bought only for the Appendices. I could see that there was a lot of great stuff scattered throughout the three movies, but it would never be worth a 9/10-hour movie marathon filled with ridiculous action scenes, mind-numbing subplots and Jar Jar-level humour to see them again. This edit is exactly what I needed. The movie discs of my Hobbit Blu Rays can consider themselves retired.

The image and sound editing is of a professional standard. There were, I think, only two instances when dialogue was overshadowed by the music. (I can't remember exactly where, sorry.) Official Hollywood releases have more garbled dialogue than that (e.g. Batman movies), so that's brilliant for such a long movie. There weren't any plot holes formed from the cuts, beyond the sudden appearance of ponies after the goblin caves. No big deal, though, because it's a LotR movie and you have to put up with that even in official releases (that get filled out in Extended Editions).

Very pleased with Legolas's reduced role. He's just a fun cameo now, while still playing a minor role in the battle at the end. Delighted that the Tauriel romance has gone. Now she's just a striking-looking extra. I was happy to lose the council scene as well, and I think it makes the great Christopher Lee's later appearance all the more dramatic. The eagles in the battle are now a total surprise and not foreshadowed (or hinted at existing for people unfamiliar with LotR), but the fact that Radaghast leads them means that it's a great "Hey! Radaghast's here!" moment rather than a "WTF? Eagles?" moment. I don't know if I'm remembering wrong, but I thought in the original cuts Bard knew about Smaug's weak spot. There's no dialogue of it in this. I was expecting that to be a problem, but when Smaug flies over him it now just looks like Bard spots it and shoots it right away. That works well for me. I'm really happy that all of Bard's family has been cut and over the moon to be rid of the Laketown nonsense with the mayor and Alfrid (the single worst thing to happen to the trilogy). I didn't miss Beorn at all. At the end of the day, he gives them some ponies and then shows up for 5 seconds in the battle at the end. Not worth the ten minutes extra run-time. Great stuff getting rid of the Azog pursuits and the false defeat at the mountain door.

Overall, then, I couldn't be happier. Spence has done an astonishing job of rescuing this series. Three separate average-to-poor films have become one great one. The tone is just right. There are just enough scenes to tease for LotR without it getting tiresome (none of the crappy "Hey, Legolas! Go find Aragorn!" nonsense). Enough of the dwarf stuff has gone that it now is more about Bilbo. And the ending worked really well, giving Ian Holm a nice cameo to finish. Awesome stuff all round.

I'll be honest, I only made it through two of the Hobbit movies - and the second I didn't even bother to see in theaters. The third one is just sort of sitting gathering dust on a DVD shelf. The magic of the Lord of the Rings trilogy appeared to be lost in the process of making The Hobbit, well, another trilogy. But everyone's had these complaints - on with the review!

Spence's edit is phenomenal. What you get here is one solid movie that tells a compelling story from start to finish. I didn't even realize certain cuts of major scenes from the two movies I had seen had even happened until several minutes (or more) after they would have normally occurred. As for The Battle of the Five Armies... other than knowing Tauriel and Legolas were supposed to have bigger roles I honestly didn't notice that there could have been anything missing. It was a genuinely solid final act to the movie.

What I loved in particular about this edit is that it didn't feel like a mashup of three films. It had the right action beats and slower character moments that a single movie would traditionally have.

My only issue was that there were a few moments where dialogue was a little quiet and I had to lean forward a bit to keep up with what was going on. But that seemed to be fixed by the final hour and a half of the movie.

To wrap up, I can safely say that this is the version of The Hobbit I will watch in the future. The layer of dust on the original three films will just have to keep building up!

Trimming excess from Jackson’s eight hour trilogy of The Hobbit sounds excellent to me. Anyone familiar with the audio adaptation from Nicol Williamson knows of at least one working model. Spence cut this down to around three hours, without sacrificing narrative integrity.

Video - Outstanding work here. Seamless editing.

Audio - Two channel, really? Dynamic - some would say too dynamic - sound design. Some of the sequences were way too loud, though a compression tweak is often considered sacrilege. I couldn’t always grasp what actors were saying. Minor quibble, actually. There was nothing jarring or chopped. Solid.

Narrative - Absolutely no question here. The plot stays coherent and works! Truncated or missing characters I did not, by and large, miss. Beorn was the only soul I regretted. If anything, more characters could have been tossed, meaning the bulk of the dwarves. Tolkien never elaborated on most of them and most could have been dispensed with. The final battle felt short, and also somehow felt “small” ...

Enjoyment - to be honest, though, near the end I was ready for the whole movie to come to an end. Certainly not the fault of Spence, who has done a magnificent job here. I disliked the films when I saw them. The DVDs seemed less overwhelming, but Spence’s edit is a whale of a lot better. Enjoyable example of superior story telling. Some movies might be unfixable, however, and I suspect The Hobbits are three.

Nevertheless, I recommend this highly.