[Azaelia of Willowbottom]

If the "no flaming" rule wasn't in place, I wouldn't dare post this...

I honestly think that Arwen's expanded role in the movies works fairly well. There are some glitches, and she does sometimes seem to appear a little too frequently, but overall, it makes filmmaking sense.

I like that she was the one to take Frodo to the Ford (It would have been preferable for Frodo to ride alone, but if someone was going to take him, I'm glad it was Arwen. Honestly to have Glorfindel appear out of nowhere wouldn't make storytelling sense, since he pretty much vanishes afterward.

Arwen needs screen time. Aragorn's love can't be some mysterious figure off to the side. It just doesn't work for some girl to show up at the end of ROTK and marry him. She needs to be a presence all along, so I think that works quite well in the movie.

I also think that the Scouring of the Shire is better left untouched. From a filmmaking perspective, it's best to let the action fall again after the climax, to let the resolution follow through to the end of the movie instead of having another peak as soon as the Hobbits return. It would leave the audience bemused and wondering what, exactly, that part was there for. It does nothing to further the plot, and in fact works to backtrack the plot. Just when you think it's over, you have to build up to another conflict, another battle, and then you can carry on to the end. In the book, it's not so bad. It's not nearly as jarring as it would be at the end of the movie. Just one of those differences between page and screen.

And besides, I think it's nice to have a little corner of LOTR completely untouched by PJ's image of it through the movies. It's not that the movies have taken over my imagination, but fundamental things are changed from my first perceptions. So it's nice in a way to have some things left out entirely from that perspective.

I also understand Faramir's character changes. I was angry in the beginning but by the time I'd finished my second viewing of TTT, I had realized that what happened made movie sense: it kept the pacing and tension up, as opposed to letting that fall and risk loss of momentum towards the end. It also makes character sense by the end (helped by the TTT EE.) Book Faramir and Movie Faramir are two different people, but both are valid for different reasons. When on a reading marathon, it can be nice to take a break from fear and tension in a storyline, because you've still got hundreds and hundreds of pages to go before you reach the real end...but in the TTT movie, there isn't so much time between the capture of the Hobbits and the end of the movie, and they needed a way to keep the picture from losing steam at a crucial moment.

I'm not sure as this is a change, as chronologically it's in the proper place, but the move of Shelob from TTT to ROTK made a lot of sense, too. Chronologically, where they put the spider in the movie is about where she was in the books. So perhaps it's more of a correction than anything else. The split at the end of TTT is in an awkward place, because all three were meant to be read as one long book. At least in the movies, there is some slight resolution: Frodo sees the light, as does Faramir, and the Hobbits are released. Isengard is destroyed, and the good guys win out at Helm's Deep. Then there's the bait, in order to get moviegoers to come back the next year: a dark hint at Shelob.