Adaptation by Vague Recollection

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Faramir Jones

I had thought about that possibility myself, which angered me; because moral ambiguity already existed in the book. All Jackson, or anyone else, needed to have done was to have read it properly, and followed the instructions...

Exactly. The book is packed with complexities, and Professor Tolkien, despite his unjustified reputation for verbosity, had a knack exemplified in The Hobbit for conveying a great deal of detail and characterisation in relatively few words. In the space of a few pages we receive a vivid picture of Lake Town and the characterisation of the Master: a businesslike man whose practical and rather cynical view of the world is challenged by the romantic intrusion of the lost past in his midst in the shape of Thorin and Company.

The films have their own details, but they overlook the quite substantial amount of detail that already exists; it's what makes me look back on these sequences in the films as a "retelling" of events that might be elaborated upon in the mind of someone who remembered the episodes in broad strokes but had forgotten the details and thus assumed that no such details existed.

Or perhaps, of course, they did read all this and simply chose to ignore it.