[HCIsland]

Although I greatly enjoyed the movie, I'm certainly not claiming the movie is perfect. At the same time, I'm not claiming to have the solutions to making the movie better. Frodo and the Nazgul really didn't work for me either and Faramir suddenly letting the Hobbits go also didn't quite ring true. I would have loved to see more Ents. I liked the way they did Treebeard, but I would have certainly wanted to see more as well as Quickbeam.<P>Certainly different decisions could have been made. Would they have made a better film? I don't know. It's possible these are insolvable problems. Remember that LoTR was widely regarded as being unfilmable (and with good reason) before Jackson was brave enough to take it on.<P>For better or worse, Jackson decided to make Helm's Deep the focus of the movie and that drove most of his other decisions. Considering the enormously popular reaction this sequence has gained, it makes it tough to argue with, but personally I would have liked to see more Hobbits. Do I dislike the movie because of this? Absolutely not.<P>I was just trying to get across that these decisions are not easy ones and are not made callously or for cheap Hollywood reasons. Every decision is fraught with their own problems. Intercutting Shelob with Helm's Deep is a problem because the dramatic line ends differently. Helm's Deep goes from hopelessness to victory. Shelob ends in hopelessness. Perhaps Shelob should have been the climax as it is in the book and Helm's Deep should have been earlier? Well then you have to down play Helm's Deep so as to not overpower the actual climax. You would also have to get by Faramir pretty fast, which perhaps some people would have prefered when compared to what they did do to Faramir, but then Faramir would have been pretty forgetable and he is a fairly important in the next film. PJ had to have Faramir have an impact on the audience.<P>Are there solutions to these problems? Probably, but they likely lead to more problems. It's fun to discuss alternative, but I think people should realize how difficult all this is. <P>H.C.