[doug*platypus]

<B>HC, Fulcrum of the Thread</B><P>I of course agree with your well-crafted analysis of PJ's reasons, HC. I think that this technique is too overpowering, though. While most movies will not have three plots running at the same time, we have recently seen several that do, all in the action genre (please correct me if I'm wrong). GL completely ruined this technique of Simultaneous Climax (as you can tell, I ain't been to no film school) for me. Episode 1 has four, count 'em four, different scenes to switch back and forth from, and it's just plain ridiculous. <P>At the moment where all four scenes come to a break in tension at exactly the same time, independent of each other, realism gets thrown out the window. Admittedly the film is targeted at a young audience, but I think that some effort needs to be made to gain the acceptance of older, cannier viewers as well. Ditto, LOTR.<P>I think that the Treebeard thread was not used as effectively as it could have been. To have the Ents arrive at Isengard earlier, as the timing in the book, would provide an earlier minor climax. And subsequently the huorns could have been sent out after Saruman's army, as per the book (also making the "My business is with Isengard tonight" line more logical). The huorns would have served to tie two of the three threads together, in the final few winning moments of Helm's Deep. We could even have had Gandalf leading them there, to cut out the Grimbold factor that seemed to annoy the filmmakers so much.<P>This still would have left plenty of space to run the Frodo and Aragorn threads at the same pace. They could even have safely shown Shelob instead of The Indecisive Nazgûl (Skippy, I believe). PJ complains of Frodo and Sam not having enough to do in ROTK without his relocating Shelob, but I think there were definitely better solutions to this problem out there.