Christopher Tolkien is not a fan of Peter Jackson
(archive.ph)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (33)
sorted by:
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.