It sucks.
Maybe some of you are happy with it, but for the life of me I cannot fathom how anyone thinks this is a good film. The theatrical version was already violently incoherent, and almost fully devoid of Tolkien's spirit. This extended version is even MORE violent and only slightly less incoherent. There were such high hopes that PJ & Co would fix all the plot holes and unresolved arcs with the EE, and those hopes have been dashed in favor of tasteless blood and gore.
I've followed SO many speculative posts over this past year on TORN, with everyone weighing in on the awesome new footage we'd hope to see in the EE. We even tried estimating how much time each new scene would be given. Maybe 2-3 minutes for the Bilbo/Bofur scene, a meaty 4-5 minutes for the funeral and coronation, at least 1-2 minutes of Beorn tearing it up on the battlefield, proper conclusions for Bard and Thranduil. Yeah. Almost all of those estimates were way off. The funeral was largely disappointing for me, and there was no coronation...Dain nods his head and that's it. Better than nothing, I guess. Beorn got maybe 5-6 SECONDS of new footage, and is now officially the most shafted Tolkien character in this trilogy. But hey, we did get that nice scene with Bofur and Bilbo, right? Doesn't that excuse all the other shortcomings?
No, it does not. Which leads me to the other 90% of new footage. Violence, blood, guts, dismemberment, decapitations and so on. Oh, and more Alfrid. None of which actually moves the story forward. The last thing that BOFA needed was more violence for the sake of it. The man who brought us the LOTR films is not the same man who gave us these Hobbit films. Peter Jackson is clearly more interested in playing with his computer sandbox at WETA than actually delivering a satisfying story on film.
Don't blame the studio on allegedly withholding the additional 10 minutes of footage we were "promised." Don't hold out hope for a non-existent Super Extended Mega Mithril Edition. Will that honestly make this film THAT much better? The version of the Hobbit you are hoping to see does not exist. A few extra minutes of footage will not save it now.
I am now more convinced than ever that the only way I'll ever enjoy The Hobbit films is to watch a completely re-edited version of them. Without all the excess bloat and over-the-top violence that has ignored the charm and spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien's sublime little fantasy novel. I can only do so much with the footage available to work with, but I can assure you with all bias aside that there is a much better Hobbit film beneath the three films we've been given. And the nice part is that I'm only one of several people working on a fan edit of the Hobbit...so if you don't like the changes I've made than I'm sure you'll find another version that might suit your liking!
This was the last time I'll ever watch PJ's Hobbit films in their original form. From here on out I'm watching J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.