There are details at the link. The ones I noticed were elimination of Tauriel and Legolas subplot (Tauriel is seen only briefly in the background a couple of times), all the silly jumping on dwarve’s heads while firing arrows during the barrel escape, the whole melting and surfing on molten gold in the mountain sequence and no Christopher Lee or Cate Blanchett or that terrible animal controlling wizard. At around the one hour mark they are already leaving Rivendell.
That ain’t a cut; that’s butchery!
Really? I didn’t remember that their characters were in the original novel.
They weren’t. Gandalf’s side-trip to Dol Guldur was entirely offscreen in The Hobbit. Neither Saruman nor Galadriel were in The Hobbit at all.
But those scenes in the movie were probably better than some other parts. While I understand the impulse, I don’t think trying to extract a “book edit” from the movies is what yields the best possible version of them.
Exactly; the movie isn’t the book, and can’t be made into it.
Where were the elves singing “Your horses need shoeing?” You’d have to add stuff to the movie to make it into the book.
(Bummer, actually, 'cause that’s a fun part of the book!)
I don’t object to cutting out some of the not-so-fun bits. “Why are dwarves coming out of our toilet?” Ick. If that got cut, no loss.
But the White Council scenes were good stuff, added substance and content to the movie, plus, Cate Blanchett, barefoot, in a thin gown. Yum!
ETA: yeah, I’m being an MCP here… Let me add how much I admired Blanchett’s physical acting, in the way she was able to glide while walking. That was something that is not at all easy to do, and she made it appear magical.
But that is what the editor of this fan edit was striving to do. If one wants to see a version that doesn’t include material from other Tolkien books and Peter Jackson’s fan fiction, this is one to try out.
You know, you didn’t actually specify that this was the point of the edit, in the post where you first linked to it. You jumped right in to criticizing on the basis of a criterion you hadn’t made known.
Now that you tell us that the cuts were in an attempt to make the movie as much like the book as possible, okay, yeah, taking out Galadriel and Saruman makes sense.
I was calling it butchery on the basis of the removal of some really, really good scenes.
Clarity, dear sir! Clarity! We need to know what the rules are.