[Sir Kohran]

davem, in response to your points...

The Beacons scene was impressive - unfortunately it was completely illogical not to have lit them & summoned aid before, so it made no sense.

The whole point was that Denethor was being completely illogical - any reasonable commander would have summoned aid immediately. It's the viewer's first sign that Denethor's mind is failing to make sense.

The exorcism if Theoden was just silly - Theoden was not 'possessed' by Saruman, but psychologically broken by Wormtongue. The whole 'demonic possession' thing was a daft idea.

He's not saying that these scenes are accurate - what he's saying is that DESPITE being inaccurate, they are still good scenes.

There was nothing suspenseful about Shelob at all - Shelob is 'an evil thing in spider form', not a big spider.

So an evil thing in spider form is suspenseful...yet a big spider is not? Are you saying that audiences will laugh with scorn when Shelob appears, but as soon as someone tells us she's an evil thing, everyone will be shivering in their seats?

And Shelob technically is a big spider. That is, as the book states, her form.

And the Mount Doom scenes (Frodo & Gollum in fisticuffs at dawn ) just annoyed me.

You can't just have Gollum quietly slip off the edge - this is the movie's climax; here the story of the trinity of hobbits reaches its conclusion. Frodo and Gollum fighting on the edge and both falling is a sign of how far they have both mentally fallen - the Ring has deranged them both to this point. The key difference is that when they stumble, Frodo holds onto the edge - though he 'falls', he is not beyond redemption, in this case Sam pulling him back up, but Gollum makes no attempt to save himself - he's too busy drooling over the Ring. He has fallen to the point of no return, as illustrated by his ultimate incineration. He sees the Ring as his own redemption - but it doesn't save him; he just dies because of it.

The anticlimax works in the book. It wouldn't work on film.

I wish those who defend the changes made to the story in the movies 'for dramatic reasons' would listen to that series to see how it should be done. Tolkien's story can be dramatised as is & work - if Tolkien is trusted. The problem was that the movie makers didn't trust Tolkien - where his work survives the transition the movies work, where the writers think they can 'improve' his work they fall flat on their face.

Radio is a completely different media to film. With radio, there is little to no constraint on running time, so almost everything could be included. Also...where in the radio version do we get the brilliant scenery, high quality costumes and props, fight sequences and realistic CGI of the movies?