So, yeah. Being the giant Tolkien fanboy I am, I went to see the third Lord of the Rings movie at 12:01 am on opening night. Despite some setbacks, I did manage to see the whole movie.
It rocked.
In my eyes, at least, Peter Jackson has redeemed himself for all the changes he made to The Two Towers. (I’d link to my thoughts on that movie, but they got deleted by accident and no one had a cache of them.) The plot details were all right and beautifully executed. Almost all of the stuff I wanted to see was in there: the Balttle of the Pelennor Fields, the Paths of the Dead, Shelob, Mount Doom (duh), and so on.
I’ll discuss some details below the spoiler barrier.
Spoilers
I did really want to see Jackson’s treatment of the fall of Isengard, but I’ll have to wait for the DVD release to see it. And, as with Bombadil, I can’t really fault Jackson for excising it. Likewise for the Scouring of the Shire. I would have liked to see it, but I didn’t see any good way to work that in and still keep the pace of a movie.
In addition to the big things, there were lots of little things that I liked. The struggle between Gollum and Frodo on Mount Doom could easily have come out very silly looking. It didn’t. A neat little touch was the fact that while the writing in the Red Book was in English (<cough> Westron), its vowels had the appropriate Tengwar diacritics.
No, not really much to this post. I didn’t have any complaints about the movie, and it would take too long for me to list all of the things I liked individually. Suffice it to say that the whole thing was really, really excellent.