The Hobbit 3 - Provisional Purist Mod

Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" is as much in need of a purist edit as the other two Hobbit movies. I agree with Peter Jackson's decision to show the battle; while yes, in the book it happened offscreen because Bilbo was unconscious for most of it, it makes sense for a movie adaptation to show the battle. And why not show a mighty clash of armies when the director has such a talent for making these things come to life? Yet there was so much that shouldn't be there or that was, I think, poorly done.

I've tried to bring the movie as closely in line with the book as I could. Unfortunately that mostly means cutting material; in this case I shortened it to just over an hour in length. I did try to cut as selectively as possible though; in particular, there are scenes I've left in because--while they weren't actually in the book itself--they were still in character for the book, 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 various scenes in Dol Guldur should probably be combined to make it look like the White Council's expulsion of Sauron as described in the books (no Gandalf-as-prisoner, no mystical combat with the Nazgûl, no creepy elf magic), sometime after Gandalf leaves the company at the edge of Mirkwood. The exception would be the scene where Gandalf meets Thráin, which should be truncated--probably to just their actual meeting--and inserted into the first movie as a flashback when Thorin asks Gandalf how he came by the map and key.

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