Bone to Pick

Most of those are trivial and insignificant. The main issue, to me, is whether the characterizations were altered. And they were, in many cases.

In general, you could say, the characters were robbed of their honor by Jackson.

This extensive and knowledgeable site also has a listing of "Major changes from book to film" for each book/film. http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/

I'm not too proud to say that I enjoyed and appreciated many aspects of Jackson's movies - it helped to go into them *knowing* that they wouldn't be the same as the books - but I certainly agree with Greg that the most disappointing changes were those that involved fundamental character alterations.

That, and Arwen gets way too much screen time...

And for all his thoroughness, he left out the fact that Jackson gave one of Eomer's best lines to Theoden.

"Let this be the moment when we draw swords together."

Agreed, Greg. Particularly Theoden was robbed of honor (made to look like a coward) in the 2nd movie. Giving him Eomer's line in #3 does not make up for that.

Adaptation is a funky business with a lot of fine lines. You can move entire forests and delete adiaphora without detracting too much from the holistic beauty of the original. But you can't compromise the original characterization. It's just wrong.

I love, too (read heavy sarcasm), how they totally downplayed the fact that Eowyn's and Faromir's injuries brought them together. They omitted where Eowyn is finally able to fall in love with Faromir without feeling like she's settling. And she says to Aragorn "wish me joy" and he says that he's wished her joy from the day they met. It's a compromise of Aragorn's faithfulness to lead the audience to believe (in movie 2 primarily) that he has second thoughts. He is noble and faithful and all he should be to both the women throughout the books.

I do wish they'd made more of the Field of Cormallen [ "their joy was as swords" ] but I can understand why they had to combine it with the coronation. Blech on the tacky tacky re-appearance of Arwen behind the veil, though. It was far more majestic and yet more like an eternally predestinated homecoming in the book.

Enough.

Telling a different story than Tolkien did in his books?

A bit of overstatement there...in my view.

I thought the movies were great. Not exact regurgitations of the books (which is impossible) but close enough. I enjoyed the movies for Solaris similarly; the book was much better than both movies but the movies were still good in their own way.

Probably the best thing about the Jackson films is that they made me go back and read the books...which I haven't done in MANY years.

I thought the movies were better than the books! Tolkien was a hack! Peter Jackson is almost as good as Michael Bay.

You may have stated it in another one of your LOTR posts, but since you're so fond of saying that the books and movies are telling different stories -- care to elaborate? What story are the movies telling? What story are the books telling?