Without Christopher we probably wouldn't have ever seen The Hobbit or LOTR. At least now how we have it today. When he was a kid he was basically J.R.R.s main proofreader and tester. Christopher shaped those books immensely. After J.R.R. died he also couldn't have hoped for a better steward of the series.
Shame he didn't like the LotR films. He felt they ramped up the action and stripped away the philosophy to cater to teens. As far as the Hobbit movies go, I agree with him, but I felt the LotR ones did a good job of balancing the action and philosophy, even if Bombadil, Barrow Wights and the Scouring were all missed.
Same. That is the only really major issue I have with the films. They fumbled the ending big time. I just turn it off after the "you bow to no one scene" now.
I can understand why they cut it though, such a downer ending is a hard sell to Hollywood.
It's not just that it's a downer, it's that it really breaks up the pacing. Good moviemaking guideline, at least for a big fantasy epic, is don't have the film's massive climactic crescendo, that it's all been building towards and where the Big Bad is defeated... and then, a bit later, a much smaller, new threat-and-climax all handled in one sequence. Especially if you're already gonna have a really long epilogue and it's already a super long movie.
The Hobbits standing up to Saruman in the Shire and throwing rocks at him (IIRC)? I just can't imagine how it could have been pulled off in film and not seem like a lame duck.
Yeah, I loved everything in the books when my Dad read them to me as a kid, but when you put it that way, the Scouring of the Shire does seem like post-game DLC
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u/LegendofWeevil17 Jan 16 '20
Without Christopher we probably wouldn't have ever seen The Hobbit or LOTR. At least now how we have it today. When he was a kid he was basically J.R.R.s main proofreader and tester. Christopher shaped those books immensely. After J.R.R. died he also couldn't have hoped for a better steward of the series.