Artist intent versus viewer perception

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I think this was Jackson's intent all along and is consistent with how he treated the character of Aragorn. He portrays him as a man who is not comfortable with his position as the Heir to Gondor and who cannot accept that honour. As such, a violent reaction to an emissary would not be out of character. I always think that this change was put there as Jackson maybe felt the modern audience would nto be comfortable with the idea of a clear cut hero with masses of honour, a mistake as it happens, when you consider how the audience/readership idolised the honour driven Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones.

Still, it's perhaps the most jarring incidence of Aragorn behaving without honour and maybe they did not intend him to be quite so arrogant at this stage of the narrative.

I believe both you and Mr. Underhill are on the right track, Lal; however, I would like to add that Jackson often takes a simplistic or sophomoric attitude towards his productions. In an almost teenage, giggling regression he reverts to his B-grade horror flick roots, where explodey things and buckets of blood take precedence over more mature scripting.

Somewhere in the extended version there was an allusion to his immature streak: he kept demanding that the mace used by the WitchKing in his battle with Eowyn be made larger and more menacing. I believe they enlarged the mace 3 or 4 times until it had the epic proportions of a school bus. I don't believe there was any thought given to Aragorn's honor or dishonor in his parley with MoS. As was inferred by Underhill, the shock value of beheading MoS (a clear and egregious breaking of a truce) trumped any consideration to the value of the characterization. Add in the joke said directly thereafter, and you have the personification of Jackson's directing style.

His method of oversimplification, juvenility and underestimating the viewer takes place quite often through the trilogy: in his denuding Faramir of nobility, in making Denethor a pathetically evil nutbag, turning Treebeard into a dottering hobbit's dupe, having the Scrubbing Green Bubbles of Death(TM) overrun Sauron's army at Minas Tirith, of Frodo sending Sam away, of making the Mumakil so impossibly gigantic that the riders of Rohirrim seemed like scurrying mice, making wargs (wolves by all Tolkien's descriptions) look like giant gangrel hyenas, plopping the glowing Eye of Sauron atop the Barad-dur radio beacon, etc.