This purist is pissed - The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Reviews

Compared to others, I am a very liberal Tolkien purist. I didn't mind the fact that they got rid of Tom Bombadil in the Fellowship of the Ring, nor did I mind the poor sense of the passage of time, nor even the fact that the character of Frodo Baggins was cast to be much too young. The Two Towers intrudes too often on my purist tendencies for my liking. Everything about this is wrong. In the book, the main characters were the hobbits but that is certainly not so here; the hobbits just seem to be little distractions from the action sequences in the eyes of Peter Jackson. The giant battle at Helms Deep that lasted for 40 minutes in the movie is barely 20 pages in the book while immensely important dialogue that filled 30, 35, even 40 pages of the book was paraphrased into a few sentences. These complaints are about poorly-handled aspects of the book; some things were just pulled out of the screenwriter's ass. Aragorn never fell off a cliff and had visions of Arwen. The fight that made him fall off that cliff didn't even happen in the book. In the same token, Arwen didn't have a single appearence, line of dialogue, or reference in the Two Towers novel. Jackson seems to give 10 minutes to her for no reason. Frodo never stood and offered the ring to one of the Nozguls. Gollum never temporarily forgot his original name and Sam sure as hell didn't give that awful ending speech at any point in the book. More irritating are the things that were left out: the spider attack on Frodo and Sam, the scene with Gandalf talking to Sauruman outside of the tower, the structure of the original book. Aspects of this movie are brilliant, namely the CG design of Gollum. He looks exactly as I pictured from the book, moves well, and gives a wonderfully nuanced performance (if it can be called that). The art continues to be dazzling, the cinematography is inspired, the the soundtrack and sound effects are perfect but when you look past the visceral pleasures, you are left with a hollow, meaningless, action-oriented movie. Considering Tolkien spent fifteen years of his life writing this beloved masterpiece, I think it should have been handled a little better when it was adapted for the screen.