Warning: Spoiler spoiler everywhere and not a bit of Think
I'd imagine that a lot of the TTT book was left out because The Return of the King (RoK?) is such a short book - when you remove the appendix that is
I'm guessing that they wanted to split the total content of the Last two books evenly to get two movies of 3 hours, instead of TTT being 4.5 hours and RoK being only 1.5 hours long. I'm fairly certain that Shelob will have her day.
As to Frodo's little jaunt to ??? packed under Theodin's arm... I think it would be pretty anticlimatic to have the ringbearer just muck about a swamp for 30-40 minutes. And while the book can convey much more of Gollums' inner workings, to give the viewer a taste for his bitterness at the betrayal by "master" it was probably better to have Gollum tied up and carried about like cord wood for a long time. In the book, it seemed like Gollum was tied up and detained by Theodin and friends for less time than it takes to get through Canadian customs! As much as I loved the book, the sympathetic portrayal of Gollum spoke much more to me in the movie.
As to the arrows fired over the wall - English Longbowmen did not fire at a target
per se when firing
en mass. Rather they would fire at a likely target location and hope that someone was in that place when the arrow landed. This was necessary because the distances covered were simply to far for the type of accuracy that we can get out of a gun. From the looks of the movie, the orcs were pretty well shoulder to shoulder, so the arrows were IMHO very likely to find a target.
...er, a little edit here. the "not a bit of Think" was a bit of
self-mockery. I didn't intend to imply that anyone else had posted any poorly thought out Messages or anything
. Yeah, anyways...
Merry Gandalfmas and a
happy New Year everyone.
-jimbob
[ December 24, 2002, 02:02: Message edited by: jimbob ]