The Hobbit - Maple Films Edit which attempts to edit the 3 movies down into one 4 hour movie, and remove a lot of the junk. Semi-successfully.
For background, I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the extended editions are still some of my all time favorite movies. I also loved the LotR books and The Hobbit book when I was a kid.
I also hated most of The Hobbit trilogy of movies. At the time, I was nonplussed as to how Peter Jackson could make such an amazing trilogy, and then such a terrible one. (Of course I’ve since learned the background that at least partly explains why the hobbit movies were such a mess - though a lot of it is still his fault).
As such, the idea of an edit that takes out all the unncessary crap they added to pad one small book into 3 long movies, and all the horrendous cheesy cgi action scenes and tries to make it more like the book strongly appealed, and I’d wanted to watch that version for years. (Supposedly it’s the best of the many versions that have tried to fix the trilogy).
It starts out really promisingly. All the prologue junk with smaug arriving at the mountain is jetisoned, and it starts nice and quietly in the shire. In fact, the first 3rd is really rather good. Once you takeout the prologue, and some of the terrible cgi action in the goblin tunnels, the first move in the trilogy is/was probably the best.
I was feeling pretty positive, as cutting out all the rubbish allowed some pretty good performances and beautiful shots time to shine.
But the problem is that the 2nd and 3rd movies had so much junk added to them, and some of it was made into pretty core parts of the movies, that cutting it out leaves them feeling sometimes disjointed or hollow.
[mild spoilers for The Hobbit may follow]
The conversation with smaug is still good, and Bilbo and Thorin’s arc is mostly good, but by cutting the whole Kili love triangle (which shouldn’t have been added, despite Evangeline Lilly being great) you end up with some weird plot jumps and lose some of the dramatic arc of the last half of the movie, with nothing much to replace it.
Imho is was also a massive mistake for the originals to cut the thrush telling Bard about Smaug’s weak point. It cuts a key dramatic thread in the book, and makes Bilbo’s mission in the mountain much less successful. And there’s nothing this version can do to fix that. Beorn’s cut down presence has similar negative impact on the finale, but there’s not much they can do about that either.
The final battle is also just rather long and dull, rather than amazing like the ones in the LotR movies. This one trims it down and removes some of the dumb stuff, but it’s still not particularly exciting.
Having Billy Connolly as Dain was also a huge mistake, much as I like him. He’d be a great crazy dwarf in a warhammer or Discworld movie, but in this case, despite being a minor character, he needs to add weight to a couple of very dramatic moments in the last few minutes, and it’s just impossible to take seriously.
So, I enjoyed the first 2 hours much more than expected, but then ended up largely losing interest over the last 2 hours. (watched over 2 nights, breaking at the intermission).
Such a shame.
[edit] So, despite doing the opposite myself, I’d say it’s probably not worth the hassle of getting hold of. It does its best, but there’s only so much it can do with the source material it has for the second half.
