The Hobbit 2 - Provisional Purist Mod

Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug" is fun and fast-paced, but even more than the first movie it sorely needs a purist edit. It may be good cinematography, but as an adaptation it's noticeably inferior to "An Unexpected Journey". There are some things it gets very right: for instance, Smaug truly is magnificent, and as ever, Peter Jackson is a master at evoking scenes--Laketown looks like Laketown, Bree looks like Bree, etc. But...so much was added or changed that just didn't belong.

I've tried to bring the movie as closely in line with the book as I could. Unfortunately that usually means cutting material; in fact this movie contained so much that didn't belong, I ended up chopping it down from 2.5 hours to about 1 hour. I did try to cut as selectively as possible though; in particular, there are scenes I left in because--while they weren't actually in the book--they were still in character for it, and there's no need to remove them.

I've called this a provisional purist mod because the real thing needs to wait for all three movies to be out in extended editions. A proper purist edit should be based on the extended editions, and some scenes ought to be swapped between movies: for instance, the scene in the extended edition of this movie where Gandalf meets Thráin in Dol Guldur needs to be truncated (probably to just their actual meeting) and probably inserted into the first movie as a flashback when Thorin asks Gandalf how he came by the map and key. (Note: this is not based on the extended edition, but the theatrical one.)

NOTE: You must own a copy of the original movie to legally watch this purist edit.