Reply to 'Exclusion of Bombadil' by John K.
Jeff C.

I have to disagree with you here John. In fact, I keep hearing how hard it is going to be to squeeze the books into 3 movies. Why? I mean let's consider this, the first book itself (paperback version) doesn't really even start (moviewise) until about page 41 (chapter 1). The last book is only little more than half a book, about 300 pages of anything useful for the movie.

Out of these THREE books, you probably only have about 100 - 150 pages of plain dialogue. Doesn't leave a lot for a script eh?

Matter of fact, It would almost appear that Tom has probably about 10 pages of Dialogue just to himself as he does manage to be quite the chatterbox. It is like cutting 7 - 10 percent of the actual dialogue in the movie!

A lot of us are forgetting that yeah, it is a long trilogy to read, but mostly because Tolkien goes into such detail describing their surroundings, where they (the characters) are headed and what they are looking at. These are things that can be taken care of in a movie within a matter of seconds, whereas reading it may take 20, 30 minutes sometimes.

The fact is, I think PJ is going to have to make up a lot of Dialogue himself. You cannot listen to what the characters are thinking or feeling like you can in the book, not unless PJ is going to do a narrative of some sort. In my opinion, they might just find out that in the end, there was plenty of time to put Tom in.

Since I heard the first rumors about this movie, I have read the books several more times, and I have tried to vision how certain parts would be portrayed like in the movie. I find myself thinking, well If I was PJ, I probably would skip this part, maybe accentuate this part, and maybe do something here to explain to the audience what is going on. But I still cannot figure out why he would cut Tom.

I do understand that part of the Hobbit will most likely be in the first movie, so the average Joe who hasn't read the books understands what the ring is and a little of it's history. I still do not believe that even with this, there will not be enough time to include Tom.

In the end I feel that Tom is just being left out because PJ does not have the creativity to include him. It is a lazy way out. PJ is just saying "Well, it's just gonna be too hard to figure out how to get him in there, so we will just skip it". Kinda like a carpenter saying "It's just too hard to nail all those nails into wall, just put a couple up there so it looks good". Shabby work that in the end will just crumble.