There were high hopes for The Hobbit, the movie(s) that would visit Middle-Earth for the last time. And, in the hands of Peter Jackson, there was a definite sense of confidence that a film would be produced (or two at most) that would stand up admirably next to the near perfection that The Lord Of The Rings trilogy achieved. Alarm bells started to ring when, just 6 months before the first film would be released, New Line Cinema confirmed they would make a trilogy rather than the originally planned two films. Sadly, as expected all three films were a bloated mish-mash of interpreted scenes with the source material stretched unbearably thin. It all could have been so different. There was a time when Guillermo del Toro was in charge of the project, who would (as revealed concept art attests to) certainly have taken Tolkien's fantasy world down a distinct design path. Fan edits are now beginning to pop up all over the internet that are attempting to remain faithful to the original text while righting the perceived sins that Jackson committed, highlight just how wrong things went. The Hobbit is in no way a terrible set of films. They certainly have their moments that honour the tone of the book; the one-on-one between Gollum and Bilbo fleshes out his motivations quite considerably and the similar scene with Smaug was pretty damn impressive. As the fan edits prove, given the right nips and tucks, there is a good film hiding away in there somewhere. Here are ten fixes that could have made the official version much better.
