November 16, 2003

Glad PJ Left Out Bombadil
Tuor

Well, I'm glad that PJ left out Bombadil as well. If anything, that would just confuse people even more because he just twiddles the ring on his finger like it's nothing in the books. Non-tolkienites would just be like "why don't they just give the ring to him?" and we would have to explain even more to them. Also, what I'm glad PJ left in was the wager between Legolas and Gimli during Helm's Deep. It's actually kind of cool having to explain to my roommates that the pair were actually having a competition about who would kill the most orcs in the book, while the other "bookish" quotes weren't even in the book. What I regret PJ changing was the Entmoot episode. In the movie, it definitely seems like PJ makes the Ents less aware of what is happening in their own forest than the book. The Ents are slow, granted, but they aren't stupid enough to overlook 20+ acres of a forest gone missing due to Saruman's tree-burning frenzy. I mean, if the trees really were Treebeard's friends, why did he not know about their deaths until Pippin tricked him to go there? I have completely changed my attitude about ROTK, though. I have decided to go with Praz on this one and wait until I actually see both versions of the movie. I was just really upset PJ cut Saruman/Chris Lee out of the movie, because I love everything he does, as he is the perfect bad guy for any movie, be it Francisco Scaramanga or Count Dooku.
Tuor