The Hobbit: The 2-Hour Edit

Friends, let's take a brief moment to review The Hobbit trilogy. It was too long for the content it had, and it added too much content that didn't pertain to the actual story. So doubly too long, really. A crying shame, considering how good The Lord of the Rings trilogy was.

There, review finished! Turns out lots of things can be said effectively with only a little content. After all, it is the small every day words of ordinary folk that tell the best stories.

Look, I don't hate The Hobbit movies. But I don't think anyone will really argue with my summary above. They had too much appendix material added that, much like an actual appendix, just didn't need to be there for the story to work perfectly well. Which is why it wasn't in the book. And I would submit that, much like an inflamed appendix, the story works far better without all that extra stuff.

Beyond that, the stuff that was from the book was also just too long. Too many extended shots, too many unnecessary sequences. There were a lot of very simple ways they could have cut this trilogy down to get something that felt as fast-paced and exciting as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but... but they didn't. And as I said, that's a crying shame.

Because as it happens, if you do in fact perform an appendectomy and some liposuction on the film(s), what you're left with is actually a very compelling prequel to The Fellowship of the Ring. And so I introduce The Hobbit: The 2-Hour Edit. This is a fan-edit of all three movies that through nothing other than effective and skilled cutting turns the whole bloated and frequently yawn-inducing series into a single tight and effective 2 hour movie.


In the interest of avoiding the same mistakes as The Hobbit trilogy, I'm going to wrap this up right here. I've said everything I wanted to, but I'll summarize for those of you who habitually revert to the 5-paragraph-essay expectation when you're reading and ignore everything between the first and last paragraphs, expecting to get a full content summary in both of those places. The Hobbit: The 2-Hour Edit fixes the main problems I had with The Hobbit trilogy, and makes a compelling case for that story to be included in my periodic Lord of the Rings binges. It also solidifies my opinion that the movies were, in fact, generally quite good, and can be rendered very watchable with relative ease.

I'll link to it again. Click here to find the fan-edit. And definitely spread the word.

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