Okay, so I'm really late to the party, but I just finished listening to the film's audio commentary by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. I'm afraid that their arguments for the changes they made to the book irritated me more than they persuaded me. They can rationalize all they want, but in the end the results onscreen still looked like a confused mess to me. The Two Towers had always been my least favorite of the films, and seeing the extended edition did nothing to change my opinion.
It seemed to me that Fran Walsh was the only one of the three who expressed remorse about some of the changes to the book. Still, all of them constantly talked about how they needed to inject tension and conflict to bring excitement to the story, because apparently they felt the book was very weak in those areas. Oh really? Is that why I tore through the book in four days? Yeah, it was such a boring story that I just couldn't put it down.
I got the impression that they thought Tolkien was a clueless hack who didn't know what he was doing, and that they had to come along and rescue the story from his incompetent hands.
Yeah, sorry, I'm not in a very forgiving mood at the moment. I'm too tired now to talk about all the things I liked and didn't like about the film compared to the book...BUT there is no doubt that the changes to Faramir will always remain a sore point for me. The onscreen Faramir just feels wrong, wrong, wrong, no matter what spin the film's writers try to put on it. Bah!