I recently learned of the M4 Book Edit fan cut of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit movies, and decided to watch it. As someone who worked on The Hobbit movies, I have no hesitation in declaring them bad movies and, in stark contrast to the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) films, worse adaptations of Tolkien's books. I was hopeful that M4's fan edit would fix the problems with The Hobbit, so I watched all 4 hours of the edit. This review is not of the edit, but of what the edit reveals about the movies. In a way, it's a review of The Hobbit movies, ignoring the most egregious excess and focusing on the parts that arguably ought to have been good.
The short version of my review: The Hobbit movies are beyond saving but, if you're determined to add them to your film library, the M4 Book Edit is impressively better than the original releases.
I think many LOTR or Tolkien fans who saw The Hobbit movies, probably including M4, came away from the films thinking that cutting out the extra parts would result in a decent movie. That's the premise of this fan edit. M4 skillfully cuts away the parts of the film that appear only in the screenplay, and not Tolkien's book. There's no more "forbidden love" story, no more barrel chase, nor rock giants, nor Radagast the Brown, no more molten-gold trap for Smaug, there's only 1 scene of Legolas (and only because he's the one to capture the dwarves in the woods), no more subplot about the master of Laketown and his goofy sidekick, and no more attack on the Necromancer. Nearly everything remaining has a plausible source in the actual book, and it's refreshing and comforting to witness.
The edit reminds you that hidden away within the bloated mess of movies, there was the kernel of a truly enchanting story. But to the film's detriment, the edit also forces you to then focus on the parts that should have been good. After all, the only footage remaining in the edit is footage of material from the book, so this movie ought to be good, right?
Once you're free of the distraction of ill-advised subplots, you start to notice that very little of the movie actually does follow the book. To be fair and strict, neither did The Lord of the Rings. You can't read along with the novels as you watch the movies. Dialogue has been re-written, events are changed here and there to be a little more exciting, storylines are intermingled through editing. The LOTR movies are renderings of the book, and somehow they struck the right balance. In fact, it's easy to argue that the LOTR movies are "better" than the books would be as visual media. What works on paper doesn't necessarily work on screen, so adjustments have to be made. Most of us are used to that, and accept it.
Many changes to The Hobbit in the movie can be excused using the same rationale. For example, the troll scene in the movie is a big action sequence in the movie, to the point that the trolls, gripping Bilbo by the arms, threaten the oncoming dwarves with, "Lower your arms or we'll pull off his!" It's not to my taste, but I see what Peter Jackson must have been going for. It's a whimsical and quirky sequence in the book, with Bilbo in danger but maybe we, as the audience, don't entirely feel the danger. We sense that he'll get out of it, because after all he's not even injured and the book is named after him. In the movie, I can imagine the expectation that the audience might feel like we could lose a few dwarves (after all, there are a dozen of them, they must be there to kill off throughout the film.)
Other changes make less sense. The introduction of Beorn in the book is some of the funniest writing I've ever read in my life. I laugh out loud at the sequence every time I read it. In the movie, Beorn is introduced in a chase scene. Beorn (in bear form) tries his best to kill the dwarves as they run frantically into the safety of his barn. It's stupid, it adds nothing, and it makes it all the more difficult to then get Beorn and the party introduced to one another later.
Riddles in the Dark is a classic chapter of the book, and it's perfect. Nevertheless, the dialogue was changed for the movie. In the movie, Gollum even literally tells Bilbo the answer to the "time" riddle (""Time's up!") It's painful to watch, because all it needed to be good was to not be changed. That's what a lot of people say about movie adaptations of books, and a lot of times it's not right because the language of cinema is different to the language of literature. But in this case, the language of cinema comes across perfectly. The blocking and the shots and the cinematography is at its best during Riddles in the Dark, and the only thing that spoils it are the needless changes to the perfectly crafted dialogue.
The battle of the five armies at the end of the movie is a mess, and it's too long even after the edit. It's baffling that the same Peter Jackson who managed to convey the complex strategies of multiple fronts in Lord of the Rings also managed to make the one big battle in The Hobbit utterly incomprehensible. The sequence events is all wrong (there's a scene where Bard approaches the mountain stronghold alone, and Thorin asks why he brings an army with him), and I think probably it would have been wiser to just fade to black when Bilbo falls unconscious.
The more you watch the "good" parts of the movie that remain in the fan edit, the more you might notice how little of the book actually does survive translation to film. While LOTR felt like Peter Jackson was putting the scenes into his own words, The Hobbit feels like Peter Jackson just took each scene as inspiration and then decided to write his own story. It's deceptive, because the plot points, and even specific actions, are the same. The problem is, even when the same events happen, it's with such a different tone to the book that they're almost unrecognisable. It's like opening a book labeled The Hobbit, and turning to a chapter with the correct chapter title, but finding that all the text is from a different story set in approximately the same locations.
There's a strange assault on magic in this movie that I never noticed until seeing the "good" parts in isolation. In my chapter-by-chapter review of the book, I tracked all instances of verifiable or probable magic use. Most of it's gone in the movie.
During the troll scene in the book, Bilbo is discovered when a magical purse cries out for help as he tries to steal it. In the movie, Bilbo is discovered when a troll reaches for his handkerchief, which results in a feeble joke about Bilbo being blown out of the troll's nose.
In Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire, the fire that Gandalf casts down on the wargs is definitely magical. He creates fire in many different colours, and once the fire touches a warg it's almost impossible to extinguish. These are explicitly stated in the book. In the movie, Gandalf uses his staff as a lighter, and aside from its rapid spread there's no indication that the fire itself is magical. In fact, Gandalf distributes flaming pine cones to his friends, who do the hot-potato juggle before throwing them down. Far from being magical Greek fire, these pine cones seem to be smoldering hot coals cast down on the ground during a dry season.
In the book, the thrush by the door of Smaug's mountain communicates with Bard, telling him about Smaug's missing scale. In the movie, this weakness is a common legend in Dale, and one of Bard's kids mentions it early on.
There is magic in the movie, like when Gandalf impressively splits a rock in half to expose the trolls to the dawning sun, but I find it odd how the movie also goes out of its way to reduce the parts that feel the most like the "fairy story" that Tolkien wrote.
In short, bravo to M4 for the edit. It was what everyone was thinking the movie needed, and I'm sure we're all very sorry that M4 wasn't the actual editor for the movie well before its release.
There are some edits that maybe aren't as smooth as they might have been.
An intermission in the middle of the movie attempts to smooth over the introduction to Beorn, but I felt like the attempt at a cheeky in media res didn't quite work (probably because the scene we were getting dropped into was so bad in the first place.)
The cut also tries to preserve the explicit deaths of Fili and Kili, but it suffers from too many quick edits and Peter Jackson's weird choice of creating a big showdown between characters who don't matter to the each other or to the audience. (It seems to me that the orcs in this movie trivialise Saruman's uruk-hai in LOTR. )
I wanted to enjoy The Hobbit, and I wanted for it to be possible for a fan edit to fix the movie enough for me to watch it along with Lord of the Rings each year. It was to my disappointment that I discovered the problem wasn't only with the extra parts of the script, but with the book parts too. A good movie isn't hiding in Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit. Editing it down to 4 hours reduces the time you waste watching it, but it's still wasted time. Better stick to the book.