I'm thinking there's got to be another option between cringing/fearful and brittle/strident. Psychotic/haunted maybe? In any case, I'm not an Uma fan at all, so her as Eowyn would've been tough for me.

The bit in the extras where they're filming the Eowyn/Witch-King fight, and PJ keeps having them do it over and over and over? He's wearing her down on purpose, right? Is that because he wanted her stumbling and quaking for the fight, or sort of a larger scope thing, that all the other actors were pretty fatigued after years of filming, and she would've seemed too energetic next to them?

he wanted her stumbling and quaking for the fight

That's one of the things I loved about the fight as filmed. You could tell that even though Eowyn was more than willing to fight to the death, she was also scared. That made it very believable.

I'm very grateful the extended Return shows Eowyn kicking some serious ass before the Witch King, because despite the run on the Oliphaunts, she came off more as lucky against the Witch King instead of "back, meet wall, let's take this bastard with us."

Reading Eowyn for the first time was my first intro to a female character who could stand tall on her own two feet at the end of the world. She might be scared, but she doesn't cringe.

Or she was written wrong in the script or got wrong direction. But she should be death-wishy personified, not trembling and fearful.

I think it was a combination -- she was directed to be trembling and fearful, but I was also not overall impressed with her physicality. Several other actors handled their weapons and their bodies with more grace and less "well, I won it because I was supposed to" implausibility.

But, yeah. Overall, my beef with movie-Eowyn is script and direction. For the sake of Parental Figure Resolution with Theoden, the character got wrenched into a completely different arc from how she was in the novel.

I never thought her particularly cringing or fearful. She wanted to be the big warrior heroine, and then she came face to face with a badassed motherfucker. She trembled, and then she killed him.

I'm good with that.

I also thought that the EE fight scenes were a bit over the top. Being the first to take down an oliphaunt was good for me. She proved herself. However, she's on a battlefield full of people who've actually fought battles before. The EE made it way more than beginner's luck.

a bit over the top.

What, the seven-story elephants charging from out of nowhere did not clue you in to this? I think ROTK broke my OTT-o-meter, way before the EE came out.

I was good with the OTT concept just would've gone in different directions. Oliphaunts, sure. Legolas' oliphant stunt? No. Nazgul diving and dropping horsemen? Sure. Orc leader comically stepping out of the way of a 2-ton brick? No.

What, the seven-story elephants charging from out of nowhere did not clue you in to this?

Not at all. I didn't think those were out of line. The bad guys throwing the unimaginable at the good guys -- I'm totally good with that.

However, Eowyn slicing her way through everything was too much girl power for me. Killing the first oliphaunt and the Witch King is a great resume.

The Legolas stunt was very indulgent -- other than that, the theatrical didn't bother me at all. The EE did.

In the book, I didn't get the idea that Eowyn was a beginner on battlefields. She probably hadn't been in many full-scale things like the Pellenor Fields, but she had her own armor and sword in the books, no one was surprised to see her in the armor, and I got the impression she knew how to use them.

I got the impression she was trained for battle, but had never been in one.