After years of having owned only the Fellowship DVDs, I finally purchased The Two Towers and Return of the King - the extended editions. It helped that they were dirt cheap, but I still debated with myself for a long time in the store before getting them. I have
never bought a movie that I disliked seeing the first time...until now, in the case of The Two Towers. But I wanted to revisit the films from the perspective of having now read the books.
So I watched TTT...and overall I did like it better than before. The extra scenes may have helped (though I wasn't sure which were extra, since I saw the original theatrical release only once). Still, as soon as Faramir showed up...aaargh! I never liked his character in the movie the first time around, but now he seemed even worse, now that I knew what he was like in the book. It's inexplicable to me why Faramir and the subplot around him was altered so much for the movie. Hard to forgive Peter Jackson here. What good did these changes serve?
The stunning opening with Gandalf fighting the Balrog remains my favorite sequence of the film. The remaining 3 hours had a hard time living up to those first few minutes, and mostly failed to.
The battle at Helm's Deep was still as exciting as I remembered it. Jackson depicted all the battles very well, and in that respect, improved on the books. Tolkien's descriptions of battles in the books did not fire my imagination or engage my emotions as well as they should have. (In that, I also think Donaldson is the better writer - but that's for another thread.) The scene of the urukai (sp?) sprinting into the tunnel to set off the bombs still killed me - I loved it! It's like a parody of an Olympic torch relay. The other thing I liked about the battle at Helm's Deep was the presence of the Elves fighting alongside Men. That was a welcome deviation from the book, though it didn't
quite make up for turning Faramir into a nitwit.
Last but not least, I felt that Frodo's struggle of will with the Ring was more poignantly portrayed onscreen than in the books. All kudos to Elijah Wood. He really gave the sense that the Ring was messing with Frodo's mind and heart. Whereas reading the books, I never felt that Frodo was really in danger of losing his sense of himself.