So it turns out there was a great film hidden in The Hobbit trilogy. I wish this were the movie I'd seen first!
About 1/3rd of the way through The Battle of Five Armies I remember having the thought, "Someday someone will edit all of this down into something vaguely resembling the book."
It turns out several people have, some of them professional film editors. After awhile, another professional editor 'TheNamelessEditor' took the best ideas from those editions, and put them together into something amazing.
A link to the blog, listing the changes made:
https://thenamelesseditor.wordpress.com/
I started watching this out of curiosity, and was surprised that it actually sucked me into the story. It was like watching a new film, one that really did hit a tone somewhere between how it felt to read The Hobbit, but still tied in well with The Lord of the Rings films. What struck me most was how much more the story is focused on Bilbo, and how much more I was invested in the story because of that.
After hearing about all of the studio interference and intense pressure Peter Jackson was under to 'just pump out 3 movies' for The Hobbit, I felt this was worth a watch. (Lindsay Ellis does a wonderful job covering it in her 2 3-part video.) Normally, I'd want to see the film the director wanted to make, but knowing the history of the troubled Hobbit production, it didn't feel like that's entirely what ended up on screen in this case.
I'm not a huge fan of fan-edits (I still couldn't make it 15 minutes into the one someone made with the Star Wars Prequels...) but this one was really special. It has heart, focus, and none of the bloat. The actors, the sets, the directing all finally get to shine brighter than the CG studio filler sequences in this shortened form. It almost feels like if the industry was not swept up in spreading movies out over several films at the time , this is what would have come out. (Like the shorter Das Boot)
As weird as it sounds, I would recommend this edit to anyone. Are there any other fan-edits worth a watch?