Actually, after watching the commentary on the TTT extended DVD, I think the real reason that the elves are at Helm’s Deep is that originally PJ planned for ARWEN to be fighting beside Aragorn at Helm’s Deep and the elves were there to support her.
(Why was Arwen at Helm’s Deep you might ask? Because he thought they needed to keep the love interest in the foreground.)
Once they started filming the battle sequences and saw just how wrong Arwen Warrior Elf Princess was, they realized the folly of their ways and switched to the Aragorn-in-the-river dream sequence as a way to keep Liv Tyler in the picture. But the elves remained … .
Just be thankful Jackson didn’t stick with his original plan!
I don’t want to risk spoiling the story even further, but the ending of “The Lord of the Rings” is not a single, climactic event, but a gradual revelation, most of which is not going to make it to the screen.
Is LOTR that hard to read? I have to say that I’m one of the laziest readers I know. I have to be entertained. I’m annoyed when the author’s main goal seems to be to “challenge” me. I love Harlequin romances for Puck’s sake.
I read The Hobbit when I was in just a little bit and gobbled up the trilogy in high school. Even read The Silmarillion–which I admit is not the easiest of reading for the uninitiated.
It never occured to me that this many people don’t know how it ends. Reminds me of when I went to the premier of that awful movie Star Wars EI: The Phantom Menace. The guy who organized the whole shin-dig didn’t know that Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker was Luke’s father.
I don’t think it’s so much Legolas but how Orlando Bloom looks. Well, I’d much rather have the girls swoon over the characters in LotR than for DiCaprio in Titanic, which was what happened when I was in high school.
The movie is a totally different experience than the books. The books and the movie are not exactly the same. What you see, what you think, what you feel is different.
I really felt Legolas in the movie. Would have liked to have felt him up. And I ain’t no teenager.
Anyone who can’t tell the difference between Boromir & Faramir (movie versions) must have slept through one or both of the movies. This is one of the Tolkienista complaints that really comes off sounding pretty dumb.
I hate to interrupt the pissing contest(s), but as for the actual topic: I’ve read the book* but I’m still excited to see how it makes it into the movie. I tend to socialize with other geeks generally, and I keep forgetting that not all of my friends have read the book, and they keep surprising me. For instance, the friend who was pissed off that Ian McKellan didn’t get the Oscar for Fellowship of the Ring, because his character dies in that movie, and that’s the last chance they’ll have to give it to him!
Yookeroo: “Tolkienista” is my favorite thing I’ve seen all day. To wit: *book, thank you very much, not books, as we are all quite aware that The Lord of the Rings was not intended by The Professor to be a trilogy but a single work!
I love the movie, but haven’t read the books. After FOTR I started reading the book, but literally started falling asleep (granted I was reading it in the middle of the night, but I tried again the next day and still wasn’t enthralled). My sister managed the first two books but hasn’t read ROTK so she doesn’t know how it ends.
Thanks to my big-mouthed boyfriend I know a couple of things that happen in the end but most things will be a surprise.
I don’t remember the movie saying that there were only 200, just that they weren’t enough. And indeed, in the books, they wouldn’t have been enough without intervention from Gandalf and the Ents, and a tragically large number of them were old men or boys. What’s the problem here?
I’ve never read any of Tolkien’s works and I must admit I am glad about that. I have no clue as to what is going to happen and don’t see how they are going to have enough to fill out a 3+ hour final movie.
After the first movie I did go out and buy the LOTR and the Hobbit. I just started reading the Hobbit and can’t wait to get to the rest of them. I also am avoiding any LOTR threads in case I accidently come accross any spoilers. In fact I have only scanned a handful of posts here so as to avoid any book or film related spoilers.
Uhhh the biggest problem so far has been cutting out enough stuff to be able to fit a three hour movie. Return of the king is 3 hours and 20 minutes and sadly there is no way they could possible fit everything that happens in that amount of time.
