barsoomcore said:
Not arguing that any particular story details were not changed. Just saying that the plot was not altered in any significant way, nor was the basic theme of the story.
I can see your point of view, but allow me to present a different interpretation of the changes.
The novels have several themes running simultaneously:
1) As you already indicated, the idea that to defeat evil, sacrifices must be made. But the sacrifices were so much greater than the movies indicated.
*The elves knew that victory in the war would result in their fading from Middle-Earth. The few remaining would have a choice of travelling over the sea to Valinor, or staying and fading into legend. Only someone who had read the novels could have understood the depths of their loss while watching the movies.
*The strength and endurance of the people of Gondor, as poignantly shown in the novels, was given very little attention in the movies - Denethor despaired because he fought Sauron for so long, not because he was just some raving madman. What of Beregond, who faced the terrible choice of fighting his kinsmen to save Faramir from Denethor's madness?
*The hobbits also sacrificed, as we read in the Scouring of the Shire, yet that was completely cut from the movies. The whole sense that Frodo was permanently scarred by his ordeal was barely touched upon in the movies.
2) The time of Men.
*The defeat of Sauron beckoned the coming Age of Men, the Fourth Age. While elves (and dwarves) fought in the War of the Ring, they did not do so in alliance with Men. The scene created by PJ et. al. where Haldir leads elves from Lorien to Helm's Deep never occurred in the books. Why not? Because, by this time Men and Elves had become estranged - such an alliance was a thing of the past. And Lorien needed all its strength to resist the armies of Sauron which assaulted the forest kingdom, as the appendices make clear. Thankfully, PJ and company felt no need to add a battalion of dwarves too.
*The transformation of Strider into King Elessar. If Sauron was indeed defeated, then Men would reclaim their birthright, re-uniting the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. The novels do an outstanding job of showing how, through all the trials, Aragorn began to show forth his personal power, truly becoming the rightful King of Gondor. One of the best scenes in the novels is Aragorn leading the rangers (and Gimli and Legolas) into the Paths of Dead, through nothing but the force of his will. The choice was his, after wresting the Palantir of Orthanc from Sauron's control to his own (not Elrond's). The movies did a credible job of showing Aragorn confronting the oathbreakers in the Paths of the Dead, but otherwise he didn't really come into his own until the confrontation before the Black Gate.
3) Power corrupts.
*One important juxtaposition in the novels was the difference between Boromir and Faramir. Boromir was the greatest warrior in Gondor. The bravest. The strongest. The most valiant. But he lacked wisdom. He failed the test of the Ring. Faramir, second only to Boromir in these qualities, possessed a far more valuable trait: true wisdom. When Frodo and Sam were within his power, he did not take them part-way back to Minas Tirith to be presented to his father. He saw more clearly Isildur's Bane must not go to the city, and courageously faced his father's wrath for this choice. The movies showed the fall of Boromir well, they completely messed up Faramir's character.
One added theme in the movies, which does not exist in the novels, is that no one on the side of Good seems able to do anything right unless a member of the Fellowship did it for them. Examples:
*Gandalf telling Aragorn to go with Theoden to Helm's Deep, because the King was "leading his people into a trap" and Aragorn must "save them". Aragorn, Gimli, and the elves from Lorien end up "saving" the Rohirrim. Excuse me? In the novels, the King knew his course was perilous, but it was the best that could be done, and both Gandalf and Aragorn supported it. Further, it was Theoden's idea to charge the orc hosts at dawn, not Aragorn's.
*The hobbits "tricked" Treebeard into getting involved in the War. Huh? They started the ents thinking about Saruman's depradations, but only through their presence with Treebeard. The old ent was too wise to have fallen for anything so idiotic as what the movie showed.
*Pippin starting the fires to summon the Rohirrim to Gondor's aid. Why? Why couldn't PJ and company have left it the way it was in the novels, with Denethor ordering the fires lit? I suppose because they had made such a travesty of his character, it wouldn't have made sense. More likely, it seems part of the theme that only the Fellowship could do anything right.
I do agree that if one reduces the story to its most basic elements (weak little people take powerful artifact to volcano to destroy great evil), then the movies' changes were only cosmetic. If one, however, views the trilogy as more than just the story of the Fellowship, then a great deal was lost. Remember that the trilogy was just a piece of the story of Middle-Earth composed by Tolkien, a story which reached back thousands of years before Frodo. This depth was lost in the movies.
No doubt, some of the changes were necessary due to the different medium (film vs. book), but many cannot be explained by this. While I don't claim to read minds, I can only conclude that PJ et. al. simply couldn't resist making changes they felt would improve the story told by the movies. And in doing so, a great deal of Tolkien's original story was lost.
