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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Edena_of_Neith" data-source="post: 348677" data-attributes="member: 2020">Please remember that I gave FOTR a 10.    That means, I consider it among the 10 best films I've ever seen.  So the amount of criticism I have for FOTR is, compared to my praise, the equivalent of a small trash heap in some street, versus Mount Everest.  - - -  I cannot criticize the film for the omission of the Gift Giving Scene, because of Dr. Midnight's original parameters for this thread  I'll buy and watch the Extended Version of FOTR, and then I might have something to say concerning the Lothlorien Gift Giving Scene.    - - -  My thanks to Whiner Knight for his comments.  Cheers! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  I have a few comments to his comments.    POSTED   Maybe Peter Jackson was trying to show them as fairly naive? They are after all in the wide world for the first time. I'm sure they'll get more canny as the movies progress. Other than that, you're right, they should have had a cold camp if they know the Nazgul are after them.  Comment:  I would like to comment that Pippin comes off as rather dense.  He doesn't learn from experience.    After Amon Sul, his blunder in Moria proves costly to everyone.  His next blunder, to dash out of hiding in front of all those Uruk-Hai, proved very costly indeed - in the film, Pippin is really the one responsible for Boromir's death.  I have heard that, in TTT, the Uruk-Hai will be knocking sense into Peregrin Took.  It is rather unfortunate - for him - that he has to learn sense in this hardest of ways.   No black humor and gentle roughness, for Pippin and Merry, out of Ugluk, Grishnakh, and Company (as per the book TTT.)  I shudder at Peter Jackson's Uruk-Hai.  They will be far less gentle, nice, and forgiving than those in the book, methinks.  POSTED  Maybe Elrond trusted in his daughter's abilities. What help did she need? She got away, didn't she? And all she got was a cosmetic scratch on the cheek. Besides, if you cut out most of the Rivendell sequence, there's nothing to show her relationship with Aragorn -- and if she'd just shown up for that love scene, we'd all be wondering where she came from.  Comment:  I appreciate how uproarous the debate over Arwen has been, and am not trying to further the uproar here.  It is quite possible that Elrond and Arwen consider each other as - say - two brothers might see each other, who had been decades-long friends and buddies, and had both served in the army.  Not that Arwen is a male - she isn't.  I merely make the analogy.  After all, she is 2,000 years old, and elves just think differently than men do, in Middle Earth (and anyone who is 2,000 years old or older is going to have new and different takes on everything ...)  And yeah, without Arwen coming in when she did, I suppose it might have seemed odd indeed, those scenes in Rivendell.  POSTED  Did Gandalf know there was a Balrog in Moria? IIRC he was unaware of it in the book. If he said something other in the movie, it escaped me. I can't remember him exclaiming, "It's the Balrog! I'd hoped to avoid its attentions."  Comment:  I still think Peter Jackson made a mistake here.  In the book, Gandalf did not know what the creature was until he got a good look at it in the Second Hall.  However, in the film Gandalf recognized it by it's light (reflected off the pillars) alone, and Saruman hinted that Gandalf knew exactly what lurked in Khazad-Dum.  Certainly, it was an evil choice for Frodo, as depicted in the film.  Either continue fighting the mountain (and magical winter storm, and magical avalanches, and magical rockfalls, and whatever else Saruman could think up), or go down into the bowels of Misty Mountains with the orcs and the balrog.  Nice choice!  However, Frodo still deserved to make it, informed of the danger.  Even if Gandalf did have to say, as they stood in the snow on Caradhras:    There's a creature in Moria capable of killing all the elves in Rivendell combined, and if it finds us, we're dead.    A balrog of Morgoth, once Sauron's Master, the Great Enemy!  As I said, Frodo had a nice choice to make ...   POSTED  BTW, Legolas starts shaking like a bunny in the book. Were any of them particularly scared in the movie? The Elfs have a name for the Balrog (of course) but I can't remember it.  Comment  He named it a Balrog of Morgoth, of all the Elf-Banes the most deadly.  If Legolas ever studied his history (and he had studied) he had good reason to be shaking like a bunny.  Legolas KNEW what a balrog could, and would, do to him and the others - and he knew flight was useless (ask Colonel Hardisson, who is a Tolkien expert, just what your chances are of outrunning a balrog on foot, or even on horseback, or perhaps even on eagleback, if it is truly determined to catch you.)  Had Gandalf not knocked the thing into a 5 mile deep abyss, they would all have been dead.  And, incredible as this may sound, if Gandalf had not fallen, that balrog would STILL have caught up with them, within only a day or two (it would have raced up out of the bowels of Middle Earth, back through Moria, through Dimril Dale in a flash, through Lothlorien like a destroying fire, and right into Caras Galadon.  Whereupon Galadriel and Gandalf would have had to make another stand against it.  Fortunately, Galadriel and Gandalf together could have killed it ...)       POSTED  I once saw an artist's impression of the king's hall from an ancient Middle Eastern palace (Abyssinian? Maybe Syrian?) and it was all columns. Huge things, a forest of them. I think such things are for show and to be impressive. Either that or the Dwarfs had a great big cavern that needed supports   Comment:  Thanks for the reference.  I believe the dwarves (Durin's Folk in this case) were quite capable of building that whole place just for show.  Durin's Folk were the most accomplished of the dwarves, I believe, and dwarves were the best in Middle Earth at stone quarrying, architecture, and engineering.  Durin the Deathless began construction of Khazad-Dum in the early days of the First Age.  Long before the return of the Noldor from the West, probably long before the birth of Galadriel, and perhaps before the birth of Finarfin, her father.  Khazad-Dum was at least 8,000 years in the making.    POSTED  When did they ignore Legolas? Was this after Lorien? Please enlighten me.  Comment:  When they were encamped by the lake, above the Falls of Rauros, Legolas said (to paraphrase him: )  It is not the east bank that bothers me.  There is something out there (gestures west.)  A threat has been growing on my mind all day.  Aragorn and all the rest of them should have acted on that immediately (I should say, rather:  react instantly.)  Legolas's premonitions were proven accurate when he said in Moria:    We cannot linger (indicating he felt a threat growing on his mind, I would guess.)  That danger came soon enough, once Pippin gave away the party's precise location.    The orcs must have been ready and waiting.  They came almost instantly, like a pack of dogs long leashed, suddenly loosed, and charging with froth streaming from their mouths.  Legolas must have sensed the threat, which he could not name, while the leash was still in place.</blockquote>

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