Aha!

Something I enjoy doing, if a film puzzles me, is reading about the production team’s reasoning behind their decisions. So, when I found Scott’s link to an interview with Peter Jackson and Phillippa Boyens about the changes they chose to make in The Two Towers, I was rather pleased. Almost as pleased as I was with their reasons for moving things about and re-interpreting characters slightly for the storytelling style that film as a medium requires. Their choices made sense. And it’s not like one could just film LOTR word for word, after all – what a gods-awful bore that would be, if it were even possible.

So yes, there’s mention of Faramir and his apparent contradictions (which seems to be one of the major issues people are having, if they’ve read the book), and Gollum, and other interesting issues that people have decided are just plain wrong. Speaking of which, folks, Aragon and Arwen have their own little love story in the appendices of RotK – go read it and stop complaining that Jackson’s making things up. Inserting flashback sequences isn’t a crime, for heaven’s sake; by creating the appenix, Tolkien sort of employed a similar technique. How Jackson chooses to integrate it into the main tale is what should be focused on, and so far it’s not as horrendous as it could have been. Quit griping.