So yeah, as I remembered, this movie is a sloppy mess in comparison to the first. Most of the individual scenes are good, but structurally, it’s just all over the place with no coherence, and then the Extended Edition fucks up the pacing even worse than it originally was. Really, the only saving grace is that the end of it comes together pretty well, and so it leaves you on an up note. I wish they had spent as much time polishing this script as they spent on the first one.

Even without that, I think that there’s room for Jackson to make a “Director’s Preferred Edition” cut if he wanted, where he could take the EE and cut it back down to something close to three hours, but without losing some of the critical stuff that was left out of the original theatrical cut; but then, on the whole I’m glad that he doesn’t want to Lucasify his movies with constant new cuts.

Although there is some element of reworking the movie just from this remastering. I actually found the old 1080p Blu-rays — I thought I’d gotten rid of them, but they were just tucked in a drawer — and after watching the first disc of this, I went back and looked at how a handful of scenes looked in the Blu-ray edition, and it really is just a completely different color grading that gives it a whole new look.

Like, they could have done the 4K scans and given it to a colorist with instructions to stay as faithful as possible to the previous editions, and gotten something that would have been slightly different, but still with the same feel. But instead, because Peter Jackson was super hands-on, and because he wanted to visually harmonize LOTR with the Hobbit movies, they deliberately gave the things a completely different feel. Not a bad one, just… different.

And at first I was thinking that I don’t know how I feel about this version effectively supplanting the old one for new viewers; but then I was like, well, wait, UHD-BD is a dead format, so maybe it never will supplant it, and this is a dead-end version that only a handful of people really even see.

But then I was like, no, of course this is going to become the version you see on streaming services and in fact the previous version will have completely gone away, and with so few people actually still holding on to the old Blu-rays, this is basically going to be the only version that most people can see, and the original version will fade into legend.

My preservationist instincts are bothered by that, but as with the first one… damn, what’s on the screen (and in the speakers) here is really, really, really good. To whatever extent these versions are rewriting history, well, so be it, because this is definitely the best-ever version of these movies.