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Originally Posted by Essex
In other words, you would have rathered Merry not attacking the Witch king at all? I really don't give a monkey if a non-book reader doesn't understand why Merry hit the WitchKing with such a savage blow. Read the books if you want to know. But to say you think it would be better to totally change the scene to cater for non book readers?
I've said countless times I wanted the sword from the Downs to be included, but I have to live with it. The scene, other than this, worked superbly.
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The point is the movies are not internally coherent, which makes acceptance of the secondary world they depict more difficult than it should be & at times simply impossible. Every time you are confronted by something like Merry's stabbing of the WK the 'spell' is broken because it simply doesn't make sense that Merry (or anyone else) could cripple the WK with an ordinary blade. As I said, the radio series made it clear tha merry's blow did no more than distract the WK's attention, giving Eowyn the opportunity to strike the death blow. This made Merry's action a contributory factor in the WK's fall (less so than in the book, admittedly) but avoids 'breaking the spell' by not having Merry be able to bring one of the most powerful beings in Me with an ordinary sword. We are, after all, talking about the equivalent of bringing down a Balrog by stabbing it in the big toe with a toasting fork.
The whole point is that these movies don't work for book or non book fans & the reason for that is that Jackson & the writers couldn't decide who they were making the movie for.
Actually, there were original scenes in the movies which I think worked - some of the Aragorn/Arwen stuff, Theodred's Funeral. Other things weren't bad in themselves, they simply weren't integrated into the storyline properly & so irritated. I wish they had gone ahead & written their own fantasy story & filmed that, because I suspect they might have made a fair fist of it. But, to repeat an earlier point, it seems that they set out with a whole bunch of scenes from the book which they wanted to put on screen, but then came up with lots of stuff of their own which they also wanted to do. They clearly struggled to produce a script which could include both, & in the end they failed.