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These movies don't teach us anything, they just confirm our predjudices about the 'enemy'. What they fail to convey is idea of the Long Defeat. This is one of Tolkien's most important ideas in LotR. Its actually a morally liberating idea - if one cannot achieve ultimate victory in this world by one's own actions, one is freed up to behave in a morally right way, through the knowledge that ultimate victory is not dependent on one's own actions but on something greater. Without that knowledge there can be no trust, & without trust there can be no mercy.
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Thanks for that observation,
davem, if for no other reason than that it made clear to me something that I had felt missing in the films but couldn't quite pin down. Jackson's version makes it seem as though evil has been eliminated from Middle-Earth entirely and that everyone is going to live happily ever after, and that feeling is something distictly missing from the book. The mythic feel of the story is diminished.
I'm sure this falls under the category of "eliminated for the sake of marketable movie," and probably rightly so, as any lingering feeling of incompleteness in a modern film usually indicates a forthcoming sequel (God forbid!).