Hey!

Oh, all right, fair cop. Just because I really enjoy that scene where Frodo's lying there tied up and shirtless. Poor skinny boy. Needs somebody to feed him. Though Sam would kill me if I tried anything.

One thing I'd forgotten was how hot Frodo looks as he gives in to the Ring.

You're not the only one who thinks this!

Finally seen it. Here's how I think the characters fared:

• Saruman

• Gandalf

• Pippin

• Gimli

• Shelob

• Frodo

• Sam

• Merry

• Aragorn

• Legolas

• Eomer

• Eowyn

• Theoden

• Faramir

• Denethor

• Geography

• Timeline

• Minas Tirith

There seemed to be a lot of recutting. I will need to watch the theatrical to see, but it felt like some things happened later in the EE. Perhaps merely because we'd been sitting there for hours. Perhaps reordering. Things like putting finding Merry after healing Eowyn was just weird and frelled the timeline.

Some impact was lost, like the Shelob moment I mentioned upthread, and Aragorn coming off the boat -- but there's no surprise left for us, so it didn't need to be as much of a moment.

Things that I realise I should have noticed about the theatrical: the disappearance of a) the palantir, b) Aragorn's pendant and c) Gandalf's staff. Oops.

So far, I rank the theatricals FotR, RotK, TTT, and the EEs TTT, FotR, RotK. I think that's because RotK achieved such a huge emotional impact and it didn't get that much more (continued...)

( continues...) of an emotional uplift to it with the extensions, though they were cool. It seemed like a bit more of a job to put everything in. Still, yay!

I haven't seen the EE yet, but in the book Aragorn uses Gandalf/Saruman's Palantir. They don't even know about Denethor's until after he dies, and it's never terribly usable--shows only "two old hands, withering in flame," or some such.

Though I suppose now that'd be "two old hands, flinging themselves off of a helicopter landing pad.

In the EE, if memory serves, it happens after Denethor's dead, so it could go either way, I suppose.

ita, I thought there was some weird reordering too, especially with the battlefield and Houses of Healing scenes. When I watched ROTK (theatrical) for the second time, I was surprised that so much happened between Eowyn killing the Witch-King and Theoden's death scene; my memory wanted those two scenes to be adjacent. So now in the EE, there's an even longer gap between those scenes, which confused me anew, and I'm wondering just how long Theoden lay there on the battlefield quietly dying until Eowyn finally made her way over to him. And you're right that setting the scene in which Pippin finds Merry on the battlefield after the Houses of Healing scene is also confusing. I don't know how I'd recut it to make it better, though, without cutting up the Houses of Healing bit into two or three scenes, which they clearly didn't want to do. In the TE, was it day or night when Pippin found Merry?

In my head, the Houses Of Healing does take a fair amount of time, but it seemed compressed unneeded. Most of the other time issues were better, though. Also -- Osgiliath confused the hell out of me -- how long did that take? Wasn't there enough time in the EE, mid-battle, for Rohan to ride to war? It does make Faramir look better, the idea that they held out for a while. And, speaking of lying dying -- Faramir's second in command seemed to have been felled during fighting, but killed once everyone else had cleared out. Again felt like a lot of time.

And was Gothmog so crippled in the theatrical? Is there a backstory to that?

Refresh my memory: which one is Gothmog?

Head orc this time round -- with the missing fingers and obscured eyes. Oh, and how does he die in the theatrical?

I really lament the lack of Lurtz. Not that he needed to live past the end of FotR, just that he was a charismatic (or is my sickness showing) baddie, and TTT especially lacked anyone that brutal and bad, yet sexy.