I’m taking a break from writing about Star Trek to bring you something not all all nerdy or geekish.

I watched The Hobbit: The Tolkien Cut. It’s a 4 hour and 28 minute fan edit of all three Hobbit movies that removes the majority of the fluff that wasn’t in the original book.

Just a reminder that the original three films run back to back to back clock in at 7 hours and 34 minutes if you truncate 10-ish minutes of credits from each of the first two movies. So this edit is only around 60% of the original released footage.

Despite being a fan edit it’s surprisingly well put together. There are maybe two “WTF just happened?” cuts that would baffle someone who had not seen the original edit of the films, but otherwise it’s very coherent and really clips along.

Notable positive changes:

• The early scenes of old Bilbo and Frodo are gone. The movie starts with Gandalf walking up to young Bilbo sitting on the porch.
• Most of the stuff with Azog and the orcs is removed. There are maybe two very quick skirmishes, and then the big battle at the end.
• On that subject most of the extended fight scenes are boiled down and no longer ass-achingly boring. The Goblin cave, the barrel ride, even when the dwarves fight Smaug gets right to the point. It’s possible the other actions sequences were also boiled down, but the original films are so bloated and un-memorable I can’t be sure.
• Legolas is reduced to a cameo with one single scene and one line.
• Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) has one scene and one line, but you can glimpse her during scenes in Laketown when Smaug is attacking. That’s the only footage they have showing the dwarves and Bard’s children escaping Smaug’s attack.
• Galadriel, Saruman, Radaghast, and the fight against the Necromancer is gone. While that is technically mentioned in the book it is not seen, so editing it out of the movie totally works and breaks nothing.

Negative Changes:

• There’s no clear explanation why Gandalf is missing when they leave Rivendell. I believe in the original edit he goes off to meet with Radaghast. In this edit he’s just gone.
• Since they removed most of the scenes of Azog harassing the dwarves the entire fight with him after escaping the Goblin caves is lost, as is the Eagles rescuing them. It just awkwardly cuts to them running through the woods and Beorn chasing them. This gives no explanation as to why giant eagles show up at the end of the film.
• Since Legolas and Tauriel are gone from the movie we don’t see Kili and Fili get killed. They just aren’t there at the end of the movie. While this isn’t true to the source material it is at least competent film editing. Their deaths serve no purpose if the story is about Bilbo and his relationship with Thorin.
• The scheming right-hand-man of the Master of Laketown (whose character design came straight out of a Kristallnacht propaganda poster) is still in the movie. He was integral to too many scenes setting up why the people of Laketown end up in Dale.
• Because the original edit showed us the fight with the Necromancer there’s no footage of Gandalf explaining where he was to any of the other characters, so that’s a bit of a mystery if you don’t know the book or original edit of the film.

I sincerely hope Peter Jackson is aware of this edit and sits down and watches it. And when it’s done he feels a true sense of shame at how bloated and ridiculous his films were. Even if greed was the driving factor in dragging things out to three films, you could still have done three 90 minute films and gotten the same box office result.