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I, too, grumbled about the altering of characters and/or scenes after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring; I was generally disappointed in it thus did not even see The Two Towers until I rented it a couple of weeks ago. Some time having passed, I decided to be more open-minded about the whole thing and did enjoy this film more. My daughter and I went to the sold-out Return of the King last nite and enjoyed it immensely. I thought the Battle of the Pelennor Fields before the city of Minas Tirith was breathtaking. The movie, as was the book, was action-packed once it started rolling. Looking around the audience once briefly, everyone seemd to be feeling the same way I did; awestruck, smiling, wide-eyed; my biggest fear after the earlier episodes concerning the demise of The Lord of the Nazgul proved to be unfounded. That scene from the book being a personal favorite was left mostly intact. Overall, as a trilogy, it was good, the 3rd movie being the most entertaining by far, in my opinion. It was a huge undertaking for a director and cast to attempt to bring the story to the big screen. Were there scenes that I thought important left out? Yes. Character alterations? Yes, again. In the book, Gandalf was a bad-ass wizard, capable of some serious sorcery; in the movie he's a badass with a his staff but not much in the way of fireworks. One of the things I so loved about the books was the endless details, history, songs and/or poems, sometimes in Elvish, that so enriched the story and I understand it would be literally impossible to make the movies encompassing all of that. I KNOW the story, characters, how things REALLY happened and find myself able to use the visual scenes from the movie to enrich the story as a whole, mentally discarding any crap that never happened. So I've gone from being bitterly offended initially to being able to enjoy the story on the whole and will probably buy it once it is released as a trilogy.
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