The battle scenes are funny etc. and nice moviewise but not plotwise...

um, where did PJ fsck up?

Well, the dead army weren't supposed to be a Minas Tirith. There was supposed to be a bunch of rangers with Aragorn who came with Eladan and Ellrohir when they brought Arwen's banner to Aragorn at Dunharrow. Got that. No Elrond. No damn sword. Aragorn had it allready. (allso the entire population on Rohan was supposedly hiding at Dunharrow allready, they didn't go to Helm's Deep and they really didn't go back to Edoras).

Oh yes, and Merry could only kill the WKoA because of the cool sword he had that he got from the Barrowights after Tom Bombadil saved him... but no, he does it with puny sword that Aragorn gave him anyway.

But the end! Oh no! The End!

1)Aragorn was crowned outside the city (he didn't want to enter the city officially untill he was king, even though he had been in earlier anyway). They had a set allready... It would not have been that hard.
2)He married Arwen. Who doesn't look like a wuss. Nor would she ever wear institutional green. ew. And he allrady had the damn banner...
3)Faramir married Eowyn (there are lots of soppy Faramir/Eowyn bits in the book but I can see why they would have to be missed out, too long, but a wedding would have been nice, rather than just having them looking friendly at Aragorn's crowning)
4)There's a whole cool bit where they go back via Rivendell and the Bree and they tell Barliman that Strider is king.
5)The Scouring Of The Shire, indeed, where the fuck did Saruman go? When the got the Palantir there's supposed to be a huge argument...
6)Celeborn did not go over the sea with Galadriel. Why did they feel the need to put him there? He went back to Lorien. And whilst we saw Gandalf's ring no actuall mention was made of it.
Oh, and that wasn't actuall the 'last' boat at all.
7)That is not the end. Much happens in the Shire, Sam sails some years later, Pip and Merry go the Rohann and the Gondor again, where they die and are burried in the halls of the Kings, with (eventuall) king Aragorn Elessar (but we had his death in the middle of TTT allong with Arwen, who died in Lorien shortly after) - however, kudos for the 'flash forward' to Eldarion (yes, the kid has a name...)
And the Legolas and Gimli sail over the sea. Together. How kawaiiiiii. (bloody hobbit slash getting all the limelight...).

One of the best things about the book is that it really ends...
That film didn't.

Allso.

There are many small plot things left out, whilst large pointless battle scenes (pretty ones, but all the same) abound. However, I hear that the Special Edition will have (in the traditional way) most of the plot returned.

I fail to see why PJ thinks that it will be a better movie if 90% of it is battle scenes. Put the extra pretty CGI bits into the Extended and leave the bloody plot in the actuall movie.

/Tolkien geekery.

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at the risk of sounding like an unsophisticated barbarian - so what? all of those details are fairly unimportant in the overall plot. i'm a raging geek, myself, but if anything i just wanted the movie to END after the 2nd post-mt doom scene or so...

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Well, I really really don't like the way he handled the ending, he finished the film in what (for me) was entirely the wrong place.

I don't understand why he did some of the minor changes, pointless and annoying.

But mostely I'm fed up with movie people making movies that are 90% gratuitous violence.

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"I fail to see why PJ thinks that it will be a better movie if 90% of it is battle scenes. Put the extra pretty CGI bits into the Extended and leave the bloody plot in the actuall movie."

Put simply, he's not marketing to geeks. He's marketing to people who want to see action movies. I missed the bits where Aragorn has to prove he's the king to the people of Minas Tirith by doing healing things. That was a big character building thing. But in general, people who go see movies and pay the 55 million dollars that this movie got to see in it's first week want to see things go crash, boom bam. Get to the good stuff, so to speak. The same thing has happened to countless movies and TV series.

Secondly is length. Rumors were that the first cut of RotK was around 6 hours long. I would sit through it, but I don't know most Average Joe's and Janes w/kids who were and will be pumping moo-la into this glorious monster of a series would be so willing. That and the longer a movie runs, the fewer times you can run it in the theatre and the less money you make in opening days etc.

The extended verisions being the places to look for the good bits, that's okay with me. It hurts they have to drop it in the first place, but I understand and accept. The battles are what look really rockin' on the big screen. The drama translates to my TV just fine.

Peace.

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What sir_alf said. You can put in all of the extended stuff for the punters in the DVDs, but the big stuff has to appeal to the masses. And it does. That's not a bad thing.

The ending, however, was too long as it was. I don't mind it being shortened. (And the Scouring of the Shire would never work in movies.)

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If so would!

Tolkien's work has elaborate descriptions of the visuals (allways good for making into films) and it has dialogue. I fail to see why you can't just take it straight off the page... however putting the scrouring in would have made the film FarTooLong, which I wouldn't mind but I suppose most people wouldn't have wanted to sit through.

I still fail to understand why 'most people' apparently want a movie with more action than plot, or else some stupid prat embarrassing themselves at every turn by their inability to do whatever it was they wanted to do... whatever happened to the idea of having, you know a *plot* that makes sense, that you maybe have to engage brain just a little bit to understand... LotR f***ed up here, dispite an excellent book to follow, I thought that the Matrix might actually be good 'till they decided that the plot didn't matter any more and they were allowed to make no sense whatsoever.

I like to see dramatisations of books, I like to see what other people think the places look like, I like to see good actors portraying characters...
unfortunately directors don't appear to like the way that the orriginal authors wrote the book...

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I fail to see why you can't just take it straight off the page.

Because the poetry would bore us to tears. Because people *actually* speaking is vastly different than *writing* people speaking. Because thoughts in a person's head do not transfer to stage and screen without a lot of confusion or hoop-jumping. Because it would take too damn long.

whatever happened to the idea of having, you know a *plot* that makes sense, that you maybe have to engage brain just a little bit to understand

On this point I concur. In Pirates of the Carribean, it's not explained that contact with the ocean activates the medallion and makes it "audible" ("The gold calls us.") again to the pirates, you just have to get that. It's not explained that the reason that Barbo

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Goddamn inability to edit comments! Stupid me hitting the button too soon!

What I was trying to say was that Pirates allowed you to be slightly confused about some points, while offering deeper insight if you saw what they were trying to get at. But people go to movies to relax after a hard day's work, and that means turning one's brain off. Action movies (LOTR, in it's entirety) and romantic comedies are most common for this. I don't disagree with turning your brain off after a trying day - working the Christmas season at a photo studio (people yelling at you because you haven't met their every need in the last four seconds, who are completely oblivious to the ten thousand other people you're trying to help) makes glazing over in front of a movie or television so very appealing. So studios trim the movies of the intellectual stuff, making them appealing to the least common denominator. I'd like to see stuff be a little less blatant, but I mostly don't want to have to think too hard. Sad, maybe, but true.

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Oh, yes, cut for length by all means, but don't then go and add bits in that weren't in the book and that make no sense... (obviously with a book that long you have to remove sections)

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