Middle-earth was born in the trenches of the First World War. It was there that J.R.R. Tolkien began writing the stories that eventually became The Silmarillion, and it was there where Tolkien experienced “the loss and the silence” that informs his entire mythic cycle. Tolkien famously served in the horrific Battle of the Somme, in which 300,000 men died for six miles of broken, ruined territory. The losses in the war for Tolkien were personal. “By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead,” he once wrote.
Despite that, Tolkien’s writings are never explicitly anti-war. After all, most of the battles he depicts are explicitly between good and evil. But like the Old English, Norse, and Germanic tales that so inspired him, Tolkien’s view of war is complex, one that both glorifies the bravery and camaraderie of warriors in battle, and ruminates on the death and loss that inevitably follows. Much as a hero’s quest, like Frodo’s, forever changes a man, so war inevitably reshapes the countries that fight in it. There’s no going back. Every war means the end of a world.
Not for nothing does Tolkien insert his own version of the Old English poem The Wanderer into The Two Towers, turning it into a lament of the Rohirrim (whose names and culture are based on the Old English):
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Peter Jackson wisely includes this poem in his adaptation of The Two Towers, in what I must say is the single best scene in the entire trilogy. On the eve of battle, Rohan’s King Théoden (a wonderful Bernard Hill) recites the poem as a servant armors him. In the background, through a door blazing with heavenly light, soldiers pass like shades— “walking shadows” as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth, another work that heavily inspired Towers (though in a different way). Interspersed are shots of Saruman’s Uruk-hai army marching to Helm’s Deep to “destroy the world of Men.” War is coming, and the lives of Men are as brief as the flicker of shadows in a doorway.
After the breaking of the Fellowship at the end of the first movie, Frodo and Sam plod towards Mordor, soon guided by the treacherous Gollum, only to wind up in the hands of Faramir’s desperate Gondorrim guerillas. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli pursue the Uruk-hai across the plains of Rohan and are drawn, Seven Samurai-style, into that country’s internal and external conflict against Saruman. Gandalf returns from the dead with a new color and mission: to urge Théoden to meet Saruman’s armies head-on in battle. Merry and Pippin, meanwhile, escape their captors and try to rouse the tree-herding Ents to war.
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While The Fellowship of the Ring is a fantasy quest, The Two Towers is a war movie. There was, of course, plenty of fighting in Fellowship, and there are plenty of fantastical elements in Towers. But Towers is a darker, grimmer movie, more concerned with what war does to people, and peoples, than its predecessor. No more dragon-shaped fireworks, no more wizards fighting fire-demons over seemingly bottomless pits, no more Elven cities in the trees. We’re in the world of Men now, in the muck of battle.
It’s even in the landscape—even before Frodo, Sam, and Gollum are ambushed by Faramir’s soldiers, they wander through the Dead Marshes, a place inspired by Tolkien’s experiences at the Somme. It’s a land literally ruined and haunted by the War of the Last Alliance shown at the beginning of the first film. That war was, of course, entirely good and just, as Elves and Men allied to defeat the Dark Lord Sauron. But even that war, with all its righteousness and victory, left behind a landscape that is still shattered and infested by wraiths millennia later. The trauma of war never fully goes away, and it still has the power to drag you down into the darkness.
It’s in the characters, too. The movie’s breakout figure is Gollum, played brilliantly by a mo-capped Andy Serkis, who more or less invented an entirely new form of acting with his performance. Serkis and the CGI team that brought Gollum to life perfectly capture the corrupted hobbit’s bewildering mix of innocence, danger, and pathos. Ralph Bakshi’s Gollum was only half-realized, and the Rankin-Bass version serves mostly as nightmare-fuel for children, but Jackson smartly sees Gollum as the key to the entire story. His big blue eyes mirror Elijah Wood’s. He’s the Dead Marshes in hobbit-form: a broken and haunted vision of the fate that awaits Frodo if he gives in to the corruption of the One Ring. And Frodo knows it. His attachment to Gollum makes perfect sense: if Gollum can be saved, and be brought back from his pathetic state, then so can Frodo. There’s still hope.
The Frodo, Sam, and Gollum trio, and their character dynamics, serves as the heart of the movie. Gollum’s a mirror of Sam, too, with his eagerness to please “Master,” which arouses both Sam’s suspicions and jealousy. Frodo and Sam are both right about Gollum, and both wrong, which makes the tension between the three work so well, from their initial fight, to “po-ta-toes,” to Gollum’s eventual turn back to villainy at the end. And it’s what makes Gollum’s arc so tragic. He really did begin to turn himself around, until his rough-handling at the hands of Faramir’s soldiers at the Forbidden Pool, and his belief that Frodo betrayed him. Not all evil comes from evil rings or dark lords: sometimes it comes from basically good people doing what they think is right, and having everything go wrong anyway.
What works less well is Jackson’s depiction of Faramir, captain of Gondor. The movie rightly sets up the reveal that Faramir is Boromir’s brother as an “oh shit” moment for Frodo, but after that it doesn’t know what to do with the character. Moving the action to Osgiliath, the war’s frontline, isn’t a bad decision—it’s a more dynamic setting and gives the Frodo storyline a better visual parallel with the stories in Rohan and Fangorn. But the resolution, with Faramir letting Frodo go after witnessing him almost hand the Ring over to the Nazgûl, makes no sense. It’s a shame, too, because in the book Faramir is the key to understanding Tolkien’s view of war. “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend,” he tells Frodo.
The Faramir plot reveals Jackson’s weakness as a storyteller, which is that he doesn’t trust the audience to sit still for very long. You see this with the warg scene, as well, as the people of Edoras flee to Helm’s Deep and are ambushed by wolf-riding Orcs. But rather than exciting the audience, it’s a slog, because there’s no real tension. The warg attack is isolated from the train of civilians. At no point do they seem threatened. It doesn’t help that the otherwise good CGI falters a bit here, with the size of the wargs against the grassy hills never quite looking natural. Jackson clearly knows the scene doesn’t work, because rather than letting it exist on its own as a piece of the story, it ends with a cliffhanger that is the reddest of herrings. There’s no surprise or fear in Aragorn’s fall. We know he’ll be back: the third movie is titled The Return of the King. It’s all false tension.
Or take the Entmoot. We simply haven’t spent enough time with the Ents for their reluctance to fight, and Merry’s bitter rejoinder, to mean much. In the books, the Entmoot is a moving scene, where the last of an ancient and endangered species decide to march to war for the good of the world. It’s one of deliberate sacrifice. There’s a bit of that when they finally do march in the movie, mostly thanks to Howard Shore’s stirring music, but it’s undercut by how they got there. Pippin snookers Treebeard into dropping them off by Isengard, with an appeal that even Treebeard flatly says makes no sense. Somehow Pippin, not Treebeard himself, knew that Saruman had burned a patch of the forest. As with the Osgiliath scene, Jackson undercuts the tension rather than raising it, putting the characters in weird quandaries that then must be resolved quickly and somewhat absurdly. In other words: he’s hasty.
And yet, all that being said, Jackson is still a great director of immense talent, and I present as evidence: The Battle of Helm’s Deep. What in the books is a fairly brief skirmish is transformed into a landmark of cinema. Battle scenes have been part of movies since the earliest days, but even after a century of these epic moments, you can’t make a list of greatest battle scenes and not include Helm’s Deep. It’s the measurement against which all medieval and fantasy battles, especially sieges, must be judged. Game of Thrones explicitly used it as their model for the Battle of Winterfell in the final season.
There’s the Wanderer scene as set-up. Gandalf’s sunlit, nearly vertical cavalry charge down the hill at the end. And at the beginning, the almost unbearable build-up of tension with the rhythm of the rain falling, clanking against metal armor, lightning flashes, and the Uruk-hai roaring and stamping their spears—tension cut in a moment that is somehow both hilarious and dreadful, as a Rohirric soldier accidentally releases an arrow too early and fells an Uruk. Then come the ladders, the Uruks clinging like spiders as they scale the walls. And the Olympic Torch Orc, running into the Deeping Wall’s small culvert to blast the wall, and himself, to kingdom come, with Saruman’s gunpowder bomb. There in a single apocalyptic moment is Tolkien’s worldview—the old world is passing away, like rain on the mountain. Even a wizard must use industrial science to wage war in this new era. What chance does Magic stand against the Machine?
That’s a question Tolkien himself probably asked, in some way or another, in the trenches. His answer, it seems, lay in his imagination, conjuring a magical world of Elves and dragons in order to both escape, and to understand, the death and destruction around him. Jackson reflects this in Sam’s monologue in Osgiliath about “the stories that really matter,” which he juxtaposes with scenes of fighting at Helm’s Deep, and the Ents’ assault on Isengard.
The movie then ends somewhat abruptly, which makes the warg attack and Osgiliath errand all the more frustrating since that time could have been spent on wrapping up the Saruman storyline (which is given especially short and unsatisfying shrift in the theatrical version). Instead, we get Gandalf and company mounting the softest lit hill in all of Middle-earth, and somehow glimpsing the mountains of Mordor in the distance. And while I don’t mind Shelob being pushed to the third film, her absence means Frodo and Sam are more or less where we left them at the end of the first movie, still plodding towards the Land of Shadow, happy to be in each other’s company.
But despite the missteps in adaptation, The Two Towers is probably Jackson’s strongest Middle-earth movie. It revolutionized cinema with Serkis’ mo-capped Gollum and the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and powerfully brought Tolkien’s themes to the forefront. It’s a modern depiction of war and loss that even a Rider of the Mark, or an Old English bard, could appreciate.
Austin Gilkeson has written for Tin House, McSweeney’s, Vulture, Foreign Policy, The Toast, and other publications. He lives just outside Chicago with his wife and son.
“Gondorrim” Is that what Jackson called them? Oy.
” left behind a landscape that is still shattered and infested by wraiths millennia later.”
See Zone Rouge for a real life example from the First World war.
Oh, what Jackson did to Faramir…
For those who are interested, the historian Bret Devereux wrote an eight-part series analyzing the Helm’s Deep campaign from a military-history perspective: https://acoup.blog/2020/05/01/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-part-i-bargaining-for-goods-at-helms-gate/
Devereux looks at both the book and movie versions of the campaign, and he uses these to highlight key ideas that also apply to real-world battles.
@1 Peter Jackson’s treatment of Faramir has always been my single biggest complaint about the LOTR movie trilogy.
An interesting take on the films.
My only comment is to agree with you with respect to the commentary on war, referencing a scene from the third movie.
The Hobbits are back in the Shire, the war is over. Everyone in the pub is celebrating… except the four heroes who have an aura of melancholy surrounding them (demanding a comparison to the parallel scene of them partying in the pub in the first movie).
It is not perhaps the greatest demonstration in film of the horrors of war and what it does to a person, but it is definitely in the top echelon.
“Game of Thrones explicitly used it as their model for the Battle of Winterfell in the final season.”
Ah. Yet more proof that the final season of GoT was indeed poorly imagined. To use one of the best battles scenes in cinema and somehow walk away with the narrative mess that was the Siege of Winterfell i almost impressive.
@@@@@ 2 robertstadler Yes, Faramir was misused, for sure. I also did not much care for the use of Gimli as comic relief in the way that was done.
Never forget, Tolkien knew all about war and trauma and loss having gone through one of the nastiest wars in European history. Having also gone through the Second World War, imagine the terror of seeing his sons go off to a war his war was supposed to have prevented! he also knew that sometimes not fighting isn’t an option.
The more I read the books the less I like the second and third films, especially the extended cuts. I admit I haven’t watched the theatrical cuts in a while but I always thought the theatrical cuts were stronger films. Faramir in the films bothered me too, in the special features Philipa Boyens I think it was talks about their decision to do that to Faramir, essentially it’s about introducing conflict so that Sam and Frodo’s journey isn’t that flat. There’s also something about detracting from the power of the ring as a temptation if Faramir isn’t tempted by it, it’s one of those things where I felt there’s something wrong with her argument but I can’t quite articulate what exactly is wrong. Shelob definitely belongs in the third film for the timeline if nothing else, so while I don’t like the Faramir thing, I also don’t begrudge them, I think they did the best they could given the middle-book syndrome they had to overcome.
I personally prefer the first film out of the three, but the “horse and rider” scene as well as Sam’s speech are high points in the series, Sam’s speech especially struck the heart of what the series was about I thought, book or film.
Strongly concur with @2 about Bret Devereux’s analysis. In fact, his blog is generally quite fascinating and I read it every week. Link to part 1 of the Helm’s Deep discussion is in @2’s comment.
I’m mystified that anyone liked Peter Jackson’s interpretation of the battle of Helm’s Deep, let alone consider it the greatest battle in cinema history. I thought it was awful. The “dwarf tossing” gag was painfully bad. Legolas surfing on a shield was just ridiculous. Slapstick elements like this marked a discordant shift in the series’ tone, heralding the downturn of quality that would culminate in the awfulness of The Hobbit “trilogy.”
Tolkien’s books and Jackson’s movies happily coexist in separate compartments in my head. I don’t like some of Jackson’s decisions but even egregious ones like Denethor’s portrayal, much worse than any damage done to Faramir IMO, don’t put me off. I just write fanfic to fix them. 😁
I never felt comfortable changing Tolkien’s written word but messing around with Jackson’s take isn’t a problem at all!
I remember reading at the time that the decision to end “The Two Towers” before the encounter with Shelob was in at least some part driven by the fact that the film would be released at about the same time as “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.” Since that film also featured a giant spider, there was concern about audiences and critics comparing whose giant spider was “better.”
For movies that are basically universally beloved, the only people leaving comments are those complaining.
I like that in the movie it’s a harder choice for Faramir to just let Frodo go and he struggles with the right thing to do, it works really well with his story in movie three and his futile attempts to earn the love and respect of his father.
I agree the Warg Rider scene doesn’t work and the switch, double switch of Treebeard is a little abrupt, but I think dwelling on two small errors with the film is missing the forest for the trees.
I know it’s not in the book, but I love the arrival of the Elves at Helms Deep. A great choice in adaptation.
The parts of that battle scene (or pre-battle, really) that have always stayed with me are those shots of the very young and very old being conscripted to fight, and the terror of the civilians who are in hiding. Those images really round out the absolute horror of what’s about to take place.
Missing the forest for the trees, very funny, Jopen! 😁
I’ve heard complaints about all the healthy young women herded into the caves when they might have been carrying water or arrows and tending the wounded. Since later shots show older women cuddling frightened children I like to assume the healthy young women were urged to volunteer, perhaps by Eowyn, and did so.
Agree on many of this points, especially Helm’s Deep. A simply amazing battle sequence.
I’ve always been incredibly frustrated by the treatment of Faramir in the movies. He’s my fave character in the books. He’s not dramatic like Boromir, who did everything with a flourish that people loved (including Faramir himself). Instead, Faramir is all understated strength. The whole point is that he’s able to resist the Ring that his supposedly stronger brother couldn’t. And Jackson and Boyens undermined that entire concept by what they did with Faramir in TT.
I know part of the problem was the decision to move Shelob to RotK. And Jackson and Boyens probably did that because all Frodo and Sam do in RotK is basically slog to Mount Doom. There’s very little that’s visually exciting in that book. So, in moving Shelob, they needed some sort of overt dramatic tension in TT and made Faramir do the complete opposite of his character in the book in TT to fill the gap. Argh.
Are there other things they could have done? Would the whole Gollum story have been enough for the tension? That could be debated endlessly. But the result ended up undercutting a character who was not only quite astute but also stood for simple and forthright honor, even though he wasn’t beloved like his brother and was flat scorned by his father.
Oh, for what could have been.
I think The Two Towers probably worked best for people like me who were unschooled in Tolkien at the time of first viewing. I had read The Hobbit when I was much too young to understand most of it, and I’d seen Fellowship several times in the theatre the year before Two Towers was released, but that was it for my familiarity with Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings story and characters. And for some reason, I didn’t get around to seeing Two Towers in a theatre and ended up watching it once it was released on DVD, at home, alone, late at night, a few weeks before Return of the King came out. And almost everything about it terrified me. The tension. Gollum. Olympic Torch Bearing Uruk Hai. Even the Ents — I didn’t know how that would all turn out and when I thought it would end with them deciding against joining this war of men, it filled me with despair. I didn’t know how the Battle of Helm’s Deep was going to go and I was genuinely terrified right up until Gandalf showed up. So the movie works — it just maybe doesn’t work when you knew the story — and loved it — beforehand. I still love all three films, but it’s my least favorite of the three because it’s still so dark and heavy to me to this day. That first viewing really sticks with me.
I must agree utterly with Skallagrimsen, and disagree entirely with Jopen27. Oh, the scale of the fight was epic, but Gimli’s and Legolas’ competition was removed, and whoever said the elf and dwarf as comic relief was bad was Johnny-on-the-spot. It cheapened thre story, and best thing to me about this film, other than Gandalf battling the Balrog as they fell (a fall that was way too short) were the serious moments. Perhaps I am mixing up what was placed in the movie with where it should have been, because I thought of The Paths of the Dead. Gimli before those doors was good, and well done.
As for the batle, I think the script writers expected everyone to have read Dragonlance, so they did things with Legolas and Gimli that made them caricatures of the written characters. I reference the elves coming to Helm’s Deep as ridiculous: ‘We are proud to die with men again. Gawk!’ is how I reference that. Faramir’s portrayal was a travesty (because of the script, not the acting), taking Sam and Frodo halfway back Gondor was pointless, and ending the movie with Sam accusing Boromir of having broken an oath and halfway into the next book in one sense and not finishing Two Towers in another made no sense. I did not like how little Eomer was in this film, the overhumanization of all these heroes throughout the trilogy (with the exception of Frodo) by which I mean the characters all displayed too much weaknesses. They are all heroes; heroes represent ideals. All those changes rob the story of its epic, its saga which is how it caused emulation across generations, and fathered an entirely new genre of literature.
I could continue ad infinitum et nauseum (is that actually a Latin word?) but I would find it hard to confine my complaints to the second film. I only saw it once, and I liked it so little I vowed never to watch the third. I relented of that just in time to watch it in the theater, just before the Oscars, for any film in theaters for half a year is worth noting. Thus, I came to believe that the only value of this film was that it went so far from the actual story that the third could only come back. All are entitled to their opinions, and I must confess that mine is because I am a Tolkien purist, and I hope I maintained a respectful tone; Middle-earth and Harry Potter are things that should be done properly, or not at all, to me, as is Star Wars. I had trouble with all these films for the details they missed. I still detest this film for that very reason.
Oh, and Skallagrimsen, as for what you said about The Hobbit films, Amen! Amen! If this film was a debacle, they were a cataclysm.
Peter Jackson can certainly be critiqued for various storytelling choices, and it is sadly easy to hypocritically throw down the “adapt it properly or not at all” card. Yet I think any ‘problems’ with this film originate in aspects beyond Jackson’s control.
Much of the blame should probably be laid on the editors who insisted on splitting The Lord of the Rings into three books.** Because, honestly, The Two Towers has some serious structural issues as a novel:
* It consists of two separate stories which are almost completely disconnected from one another
* Neither of those stories has a proper beginning or end, at least within the book itself
* One of the stories has no antagonist in the form of a ‘person’; one might be said to appear at the end, but she is more a force of nature than a ‘person’
Those characteristics would result in a terrible movie if the book text were adapted ’faithfully’.
New Line Cinema’s insistence on “three books = three films” was also a significant impediment to an adaptation that would make the purists happier. While Fellowship is structured in a way that maps pretty well to the narrative requirements of a single feature film, the other two books perhaps should have been split into three films:
* The Two Towers: Orthanc to cover Aragorn/Legolas/Gimil from the Breaking of the Fellowship through the battle of Helm’s Deep
* The Two Towers: Minas Morgul to cover Frodo/Sam/Gollum from the Breaking of the Fellowship through the escape from Cirith Ungol
* The Return of the King to cover the rest of the story
As disappointing as it was to see Faramir briefly turned into an antagonist, it makes sense within the narrative requirements of a three-film sequence, and I think the the filmmakers did a decent job considering the constraints. The issues with previous attempts to adapt the story to film probably made a four-film commitment too hard a sell to the execs, whatever merits that would have had from a storytelling perspective.
** Or maybe the Nazis, for starting the war that created the post-war paper shortage in the first place. Hard to go wrong blaming the Nazis for anything!
@@@@@ 18, lan
Much of the blame should probably be laid on the editors who insisted on splitting The Lord of the Rings into three books.** Because, honestly, The Two Towers has some serious structural issues as a novel:
* It consists of two separate stories which are almost completely disconnected from one another
* Neither of those stories has a proper beginning or end, at least within the book itself
I met The Two Towers in a gas station spinner rack. The Ace edition, but what did I know?
It started with someone riding somewhere with someone and asking, “Are there dragons in this land?” That looked interesting, so I bought it. It was a good read. For a while.
Then I was with some other folks, in some other place, traveling somewhere, for some reason.
I put it down. It was half a year before I attempted the second half of the book.
Ian, I stand by what I wrote, and daresay it was not hypocritical. If I returned as a zombie, I would talk about The Lord of the Rings. It has always been my favorite series, and agree with the late, great Isaac Asimov, who was not a humble man, when he said it, and not his Foundation series, should’ve received the best science fiction services of all time award. It is the first series that I ever read, though not in order (long story), and as even shaped my world view and character. In essence, I cut my teeth on those books. There are few for whom these books are more important. Pues, for someone like that, I believe it impossible to be hypocritical in criticism. I will concede that, mayhap, I was hyper-critical.
Nor do I think I know more of cinematic storytelling than Peter Jackson. I would be inspired by choices he made to do them better, and would certainly use his level of CGI at the least. His scale, and his choice of actors was excellent, across the series, and his re-telling brought millions, dare I guess, billions more people to Middle-earth, and for people who had never read the books, perhaps all three films were more than adequate. And unlike The Hobbit mess, he at least had the sense to make the most mistakes in the second film, and I heard he despaired at having to salvage something in the last of Bilbo’s films. As for not wanting Shelob compared to Aragog (thanks whoever mentioned that) it makes a kind of sense, though that happened regardless.
As for splitting the books into more movies, I agree, but think The Fellowship should have been split: Flight to the Ford, and perhaps The Ring Goes South. Professor Tolkien wrote the series as six books, and such a cinematic choice would have let Mr Jackson not need to scrimp at the beginning, which he did in some aspects, methinks. Yet some of the changes he made, I accepted.
@20: “I believe it impossible to be hypocritical in criticism.” That depends upon the degree to which criticism is actual art criticism (i.e. assessing the work on its own merits and the requirements of its medium) vs. merely griping that the creator made artistic choices that did not match the reviewer’s preferences. But yes, “hyper-critical” is probably a more accurate (and less provocative) description of something so inherently subjective.
Thinking through the narrative challenges of this film (and RotK), it occurs to me that two of the major film franchises of the aughts–LotR and the Harry Potter series—both ended up being slightly disappointing and frustrating for the very same reasons. Both get the overall look-and-feel right, have excellent casting, and have impressive first installments; but as both series progressed, the accumulation of various narrative choices made to fit the needs of feature films caused gaps between the screen and text versions of the stories that were quite wide by the closing credits of the last installment. After waiting for decades to see a proper live-action adaptation of LotR—one that certainly succeeds as its own, self-contained entity—now part of me wishes Peter Jackson (or whoever) had held off just a few more years until modern TV-production capabilities had reached our current standards.
It will be interesting in a few years to compare fan assessments of those series against those for the next round of similar SFF screen adaptations—primarily The Wheel of Time and Foundation—to check whether the latter will be able to utilize the greater flexibility of TV-show pacing & epsiode length to hew closer to their source material. (Dune holds out this possibility too, for while it is going the feature-film route the producers are at least clear that it is one book that requires multiple installments.)
Ian – I wish your last paragraph would hold true, but from what I can tell thus far, both Foundation and Wheel of Time are not exactly aiming to “hew closer to their source material”, at least from what I can tell thus far. This saddens me, as I’d love to see both of these tales properly on (a) screen, but I believe Game of Thrones (at least first few seasons) most likely wins the prize (and doesn’t look like it will lose it anytime soon) for a tale well-translated from book to screen.
Planting a flag here for those of us to whom Faramir is largely meaningless. He’s a secondary character in book and film, and his “treatment” by Jackson & Co gets nothing from me but a shrug. As for him being key to Tolkien’s view of war, I’ve read the books a half dozen times and have never come away with any of that. His parts are among the most skimmable to me. The absence of Ghân-buri-Ghân in the movies was more annoying to me than Faramir going to Osgiliath.
Ian, thank you for the concession that hyper-critical was perhaps more correct. I find that to be very gracious. Again, I thank thee.
And I agree entirely with your second paragraph. As I Rewatched HP I indeed detected cumulative change from the books, (and my introduction to that story was the second film) that grew worse ’til I watched film eight. The ending of that disgusted me. I took it as a cheap attempt to end exactly where the books did, when the rest of the battle was miles away from it, to me. Books this intricate must, I believe, be done in multiple parts to pull off accurately. I would guess that at least a large minority will always be unforgiving of plot changes, and less understanding that books and film must have differences. They are organic, even mandated by their very natures. I don’t know if I did that. I hope I didn’t. And loved the use of “aughts”! I don’t know about GOT being closer or not. I do not remember ASOIAF as well. I merely hope he finishes it.
I am sorry for any misspellings in these. I noted some. This is a small keyboard. Oh and Puff (love the name!) Faramir is minor, but memorable to many. The dichotomy ‘tween him and Boromir stands out, I think. As for Ghan Buri Ghan, I reference the above paragraph. To include him, or especially Bombadil, would require six, at least. I would love to see it done. Harry Potter would need at least ten films. A dozen perhaps, and ASOIAF or WOT… the number of films would be staggering.
Oh, and to be clear, I only know WOT and ASOIAF from the printed side. I invested years waiting for WOT to be written, and reached a downturn in emotional investment. I can’t invest as much as I did anymore. My passions haved changed, though not ended. I was comparing ASOIAF to LOTR above. It is well-written, but I don’t love it as much.
A minor point, perhaps, but “The Two Towers” has what must be my favorite line-reading of the three movies. It’s just after Gollum has offered to guide Frodo and Sam on the way to Mordor. As he edges past Sam, he looks at him and says, “Nice hobbit,” in the same tone of voice one would say “Nice doggie” to a canine of uncertain friendliness, and Sam gives him a look as if he’s not quite sure he’s been insulted.