Christopher Tolkien is not a fan of Peter Jackson
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To be fair, The Hobbit is a stain on him.
Christopher wasn't a fan of the LoTR movies either. He said they were too focused on action and missed elements of the story that were very important to JRR. I don't remember f he specifically mentioned the exclusion of Tom Bombadil, but I always got the impression that that was a big bone of contention for him.
I can't remember much about Tom Bombadil from when I read the books, but the gist of all discussions surrounding his exclusion came down to "he did nothing to progress the story, and the movie was full as is."
I actually agree. That whole sequence really wouldn't have translated well into film, but it was very important to Tolkien, and his son clearly didn't like that a lot of the slower, less action-oriented elements of the story were excluded from the films.
How long was the full, uncut trilogy again? 10-11 hours? Even more? I definitely saw that there were lots of other scenes filmed that had the same issue- it didn't progress the story, and whatever character building it did was insignificant. "Acceptable time constraints for an audience" is a real bitch.
He gives the hobbits the Barrow-blades that are eventually used to kill the Witch King because that's the point of them. Films don't include this lore however and the blades are just hobbit sized "swords" in the end.
if they had gone with 6 films (each book in half part 1 part 2) they could have probably fit everything in
only problem is it would probably take 3 days to watch all the extended editions of the films
films are at a disadvantage when it comes to adapting existing stories because they can only be so long (bring back the intermission i say) and i think that is why in japan in the 90s at least OVAs were so big, you had a story it was too big for a film but probably too small for a TV series (or not enough budget) so they made 3-6 hour long episodes instead
Read em again my man.
If it would have come out first, it wouldn’t get nearly as much hate.
It’s problem was it came out after a theatrical masterpiece that will never be replicated.
And if it had come out first, we wouldn't have Spider Legolas hogging screentime in a film he shouldn't have been in, period.
Point taken
Also probably would have gotten much less hate if it wasn't itself a trilogy.
There's a fanedit that someone did that condensed the trilogy down to one 5 hour movie that a lot of people (myself included) like more than the movies.
It's artificially padded to an insane degree.