tolkienjackson2

Most other scenes in the films play true - but not all. While the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, remains remarkably faithful to plot, character and setting, some exaggerated and unwarranted events in the other two movies distort some of the book's central moral currents.
In the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo inherits the magic ring from his uncle Bilbo, the adventurous hobbit who had gotten the ring from Gollum decades earlier. After a time Frodo learns with the help of Gandalf that Sauron's minions may be closing in on his location, and so Frodo sets off with his gardener Sam Gamgee and his two hobbit cousins, Merry and Pippin, for Rivendell, home of the powerful elf lord Elrond. The Fellowship of the Ring traces the harrowing journey to Rivendell, and tells how a council of elves, dwarves, men, Gandalf and Frodo decides the ring is too dangerous even to try to hide, and must be destroyed. There Frodo accepts the burden of taking it to the fires of Mount Doom, where Sauron forged it deep in Middle-earth's antiquity and the only place it can be unmade. During the journey, Gandalf is lost fighting a terrible being called a Balrog in Moria, under great mountains, and the company continues on led by Aragorn, a man of exceptional abilities, virtues and indeed weaknesses that he grapples with through most of the novel.
Jackson's film does an excellent job of shaping the characters and collapsing events to fit the Fellowship of the Ring film's limitations. The journey continues in The Two Towers, but partway through this second installment, Jackson's version of events goes seriously awry of the original. After the company has splintered, Frodo, Sam and Gollum (who ironically has become the two hobbits' guide) are captured by Faramir, a captain of the realm of Gondor, the main defenders against Sauron's attacks. The film matches these events. In the book, Faramir talks at length with Frodo and Sam and learns through his own cleverness and Sam's blundering what they are actually doing in the wilds of northeast Gondor. At this point Faramir faces a perilous choice: he can seize the ring of power for himself, or he can let the quest continue. His "quality," as Sam names it - or moral insight and inner strength - prevails, and even though it may cost him serious trouble with his father Denethor, the steward-lord of Gondor, he frees the three to continue the quest. His intuitive understanding in the book that he has met a situation much larger than himself, helps him fend off the ring's corrosive, which he has only just encountered. It is a struggle, but he prevails.
The film, however, reverses this point of character. Instead of enabling the quest, Faramir submits vainly to the ring's temptation to try to curry favor with his father, and he decides to drag the three back to the besieged city of Osgiliath. This did not happen in the book, and could never have happened. The film Faramir lacks "quality," though the screenwriters tried to make it seem otherwise. The strength of Faramir, which is palpable in the book, becomes weakness in the movie and undercuts the force of that episode of the story.
The reversal of Faramir's moral quality puts the very plot of the film out of joint. After Faramir hauls Frodo, with the ring, off to Osgiliath, an attack of orcs leaves Frodo standing by himself on a parapet. A Ringwraith, one of Sauron's minions dispatched to attack Gondor's forces and to search for the ring, spots Frodo and as he hovers close by, Frodo, transfixed, holds the ring up before the Ringwraith's face.
This scene departs decidedly from the core of the original. The ring's corrupting power is so thoroughly in control of Sauron and his minions that once they knew the exact location of the ring and who was holding it, they would stop at nothing to retrieve it. Sauron would unleash all nine Ringwraiths (as indeed he had already done in The Fellowship of the Ring), and Faramir and the soldiers of Gondor would be unable to resist their monstrous supernatural powers. In a sense, nothing that happens in the movies after this scene can have happened because showing the ring to the Ringwraith would have altered Sauron's strategy.

Instead, the movie contrives for Frodo to come to his senses, Faramir to relent, and Frodo, Sam and Gollum to make a hasty and unbelievable escape from Osgiliath. When the film departs
from the original moral vision, even the literal plot becomes misshapen.
Another deviation that violates the book's spirit too deeply to ignore occurs when Treebeard the ent (a treelike creature), who is "the oldest living thing walking Middle-earth" and possibly the wisest, is tricked by Merry and Pippin into going to war against the turncoat wizard Saruman. Now Treebeard is the ancient keeper of the forest and is so bound up with it that his true name is also the forest's name, "Fangorn"; but somehow in the film it has escaped him that whole ranges of trees on his southern border have been clear-cut by Saruman's hideous helpers, the orcs. Why Treebeard and his fellow ents would not know this, is impossible to guess and could not have occurred in the book. In the film Treebeard and the ents seem ignorant and blockheaded until the youngsters Merry and Pippin trick them into seeing what's really happening, and this unravels one of the story's moral continuities - the representations of different kinds and occasions of wisdom, in this case Treebeard's elder nature-wisdom.***
The central "human" relationship of The Lord of the Rings is that of Frodo and Sam, and one finely developed point throughout the book is that their friendship, love and loyalty to each other are the virtually inviolable source of their inner strength. Even in the face of terrible suffering, terrible spiritual temptation and overpowering evil, the enduring quality of these virtues is demonstrated - wholly believably - over and over in the book. One of the most emotionally powerful moments occurs near the end of the quest as they labor exhausted and half-starved up the desolate side of Mount Doom. Sam lifts Frodo, who has all but collapsed, and carries him the last distance up the slope. The scene is given not with melodrama, but with the force of the strength love and loyalty truly afford. This scene is handled remarkably well in the last film.
But elsewhere in the last two films, the two hobbits' relationship is often portrayed as tense, and at one point actually ruptures. Frodo frequently scolds and sneers at Sam (Elijah Wood's sneering being a significant failing of his performance - in the book Frodo is a person of temperance and dignity even when he feels weakest). Worse, at a critical moment in the third film, the screenwriters have him succumb to trickery, ally himself with Gollum, and actually order Sam to go away. This would be impossible in the book. The whole story and the fate of Middle-earth depend on the two hobbits' friendship. This scene in The Return of the King seriously distorts the story's deepest, most powerful spiritual theme: the multidimensional binding force of love which even the ring does not violate. The ring touches and corrupts Frodo, and at one point it touches and begins its work on Sam; but it never touches or corrupts the two together. Even when Frodo makes his chilling speech at the Crack of Doom informing Sam that in the end he will not destroy the ring but instead keep it for himself, he is not in opposition to Sam himself, only to the goal of the quest. The quest succeeds because of their love. When the film Frodo spurns Sam and sends him back down the stair of Cirith Ungol, the core of the original is outright discarded. I have a feeling that Tolkien, if he'd been alive for screenwriters Jackson, Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh to consult, would have rejected this development outright as unwarranted.
Finally, the third film omits a significant chapter from the end of the novel, creating trouble for the core theme that when corruption occurs, it is not selective. In the book, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin return to The Shire to find it overrun by "big people" who have imprisoned the community leaders, instituted totalitarian laws, established a bumbling police force of mostly unwilling hobbit collaborators, demolished woods and dwellings, built smoke-belching hovels, and generally made Shire life a lot worse. The four hobbits muster the loyal hobbits - which includes almost everybody - and clean up the problem by killing, capturing or driving off the troublemakers, whose leader turns out to be the disempowered Saruman.
This series of events is omitted from the last movie. Instead, the hobbits, though changed themselves, return to a Shire in exactly the condition they left it, both physically and spiritually. While it's possible to live with this ending - especially given the fact that the film is already more than three hours long - it must be pointed out that "The Scouring of the Shire" is one of the most inspiring chapters in The Lord of the Rings because its events play so true to core senses of how corruption, courage and endurance work. One of the book's multidimensionally drawn moral lessons is that evil poisons as well as demolishes and never wholly disappears, even when vanquished; those who encounter evil are changed by it win or lose, and the victors must undertake to heal what's left as best they can. But this sense is virtually lost in the movie. (I might suggest that Peter Jackson make a separate short film titled "The Scouring of the Shire" and fill out this vacancy in the film story.)
Tom Shippey makes elaborate apologies that speak to some of these deviations, and this seems to spring partly, and correctly, from a generosity of spirit toward Peter Jackson's project, and partly from an explicit recognition that the problems of narrative art in film do differ from the problems of narrative art in prose fiction. The act of imagination required of a reader differs from the act required of a movie-goer, and likewise, the spell cast through words evokes experiences in different inner ranges than