[Iris Alantiel]

Well said, Lush.<P>I guess PJ and his associates thought the movie had to have as happy an ending as they could get away with without being blatantly non-canonical (i.e. Frodo stays in the Shire and gets married). So they don't demonstrate the pain of Elrond and Arwen's parting, because it would detract from the happiness of her and Aragorn's wedding And they don't really demonstrate the depth of Frodo's pain because we like Frodo, and we don't want him to be in pain. After spending a minimum of nine hours of our lives on these movies, PJ and friends has decided, we won't want to deal with the sadder side of the story; we'll want to be happy.<P>And for a lot of people, he's right. The idea that Arwen and Elrond will never, never, NEVER see each other again, or that Frodo's spirit has been crushed by the quest he has endured - those are depressing thoughts. After spending so much time watching the struggle to save Middle Earth, such a depressing ending would leave the audience with the impression that Sauron might be gone, but life kind of seemed lot more cheerful before.<P>The bottom line is, books can give us a kind of complexity that movies really can't. From the books, we understand all the nuances of life in ME that lead to Arwen's choice and Frodo's departure, and we can see that these events are not representative of Middle Earth. But in a movie, we have to get an overall sense of a happy ending even though Frodo must leave, or else the entire nine-and-some-odd hours of the journey have been for nothing. Furthermore, we have to get this sense in a fairly short amount of time at the movie's end. So I say, yes, PJ and friends did simplify the ending and sanitize it a little bit to make it more viewer-friendly, but that's how movies are. If you want the original, powerful, tragically beautiful ending, read the books. It's still in there.