TolkienEditor has cut Peter Jackson’s abusive monstrosity in half and thereby, in large part, restored Tolkien’s much-beloved tale:
I decided to condense all three installments (An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies) into a single 4-hour feature that more closely resembled Tolkien’s original novel. Well, okay, it’s closer to 4.5 hours, but those are some long-ass credits! This new version was achieved through a series of major and minor cuts, detailed below:
The investigation of Dol Guldor has been completely excised, including the appearances of Radagast, Saruman and Galadriel. This was the most obvious cut, and the easiest to carry out (a testament to its irrelevance to the main narrative). Like the novel, Gandalf abruptly disappears on the borders of Mirkwood, and then reappears at the siege of the Lonely Mountain with tidings of an orc army.
The Tauriel-Legolas-Kili love triangle has also been removed. Indeed, Tauriel is no longer a character in the film, and Legolas only gets a brief cameo during the Mirkwood arrest. This was the next clear candidate for elimination, given how little plot value and personality these two woodland sprites added to the story. Dwarves are way more fun to hang out with anyway. 😛
The Pale Orc subplot is vastly trimmed down. Azog is obviously still leading the attack on the Lonely Mountain at the end, but he does not appear in the film until after the company escapes the goblin tunnels (suggesting that the slaying of the Great Goblin is a factor in their vendetta, as it was in the novel).
I was pleased to learn that in addition to getting rid of “Tauriel”, the ridiculous barrel-fight is also gone. The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit is a 6GB MP4 file, available by either torrent or direct download. Not all of Jackson’s egregious stupidities have been excised, but most of them have been surgically removed.
UPDATE: Another, even more reduced option:
After about 312 new edits and cuts and almost 5 hours removed
from the trilogy, this single film combines the three Peter Jackson
movies into one immense epic that accurately tells the story of Bilbo,
while maintaining what new ideas and battles have been implanted in
Jackson’s retelling (such as the Battle of the Five Armies containing
orcs instead of goblins).The following is a list of all the major
edits/alterations to the films for this single edit. Scenes aren’t
always simply removed, sometimes they are repositioned or sometimes
specific elements are taken out or added in for coherency or pacing:
- Removed all of Elf-Dwarf Love Triangle Plot
- Removed all of Gandalf’s necromancer adventures
- Removed most of orc scenes/battles/mentions in first 2/3’s of
the film (including removing frames with orcs from the post-goblin
escape scene at the end of “Unexpected Journey”)- Removed Bilbo killing a wolf – the first thing he kills is the spider in Mirkwood forest, giving the sword the name “Sting”
- Removed all of (elder) Bilbo’s introduction to the lore
- Removed all of the heavy foreshadowing for LOTR and the evil of the ring – kept to the spirit of the book, it was a playful invisibility ring!
- Added a deleted scene of the Shire villagers as an intro to the film
- Reduced much of the Dwarves’ dinner at Bilbo’s
- Created faster transition to Bilbo getting out of the house
- Reduced Rivendell
- Reduced Stone Giant scene
- Reduced goblin scene, re-ordered dialogue to mirror book interactions between Thorin & Goblin King
- Kept Gollum scene entirely intact – no cutting between that
and the goblin lair, although shortened as well as removed Gollum
beating the corpse in the beginning- Created voice-over transition into Beorn scene at the beginning of “Desolation of Smaug”
- Reduced Mirkwood forest & Woodland Realm capture scenes
- Heavily reduced Laketown capture (all of Laketown is about 10 minutes total now)
- Removed Smaug battle scene with dwarves in the mines (kept
Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug, the battle was outrageously cartoonish
and long)- Removed Bard using his son as a bow, the shots dance around it and the scene is intact
- Rearranged much of Battle of Five Armies for coherency of
Bilbo concealing and giving away the Arkenstone without the need for so
many silly slow-motion Thorin bits- Removed many elements of the Battle of Five Armies that
contained too much CGI monsters or silly battle actions (like repeated
head-butting)- Reduced and rearranged the battle to get to Thorin quicker
- Removed elves from the final fight scene (Kili fights the orc in order to protect Bilbo instead of his elf love interest)
- Removed final flash-forward scene, the film ends with Bilbo finally coming home