[doug*platypus]

Yeah, the three (four counting Gandalf) threads of the adventures of the Fellowship were just begging to be inter-cut one with the other in a film version. In the book, jumping back and forth would be confusing. But in the movie, having one story told before the other would be confusing. We would lose track of exactly when events were taking place. In the book, Tolkien was able to place timelines in, for example when Sam and Frodo are travelling through Mordor and he says "Théoden lay dying on the Pelennor Fields". No such opportunity to do this in a movie. Tolkien was a brilliant author, but he was not a film director. Whatever mistakes Jackson made in his interpretation of the book, he remains a good director with a number of successes under his (these days much looser) belt.

I thought that the Uruks looked magnificent; much better than in FOTR, where they all basically looked like clones, apart from Lurtz.

"I'm wasted on cross country. We Dwarves are natural sprinters!" did elicit a chuckle from me. One of the few times I appreciated the Gimli sideshow, wildly inaccurate though this quote is.