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Do you really think people go to the movies to see half an hour of people talking? No, they go to see drama, action and emotion.
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I take it you've never seen
The Wannsee Conference? An hour and a half or more of absolutely gripping (and horrifying) drama- and it's nothing more than the verbatim recitation of the minutes of a real-life committee meeting.
One could also throw in
My Dinner With Andre and many more which belie the video-game mentality that you gotta put 'action' on screen or else bore the audience.
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Who said Gothmog was an Orc? In fact he was explicitly *not* an Orc: "It was no brigand nor Orc-chieftain who commanded...."
Still, objections on this sort of geek-level are trivial compared to the fact that PJ Just Doesn't Get Tolkien: not his themes, his style, his moral vision, his sense of language, none of it. Just monsters and fights. This is a guy who calls the Eorlingas the "Rohans," after all, and thinks "Rohirrim" applies only to the king's cavalry. (If you want to get truly geekish, then PJ should be taken to task for having Theoden et al refer to their country as "Rohan", which in the book they never do- it is, after all, a Sindarin name coined in Gondor. How could anyone so deaf to language think they were qualified to adapt Tolkien? Misologists, Tolkien would call them. Hiring David Salo to concoct some snatches of pseudo-Elvish (while omitting all of Tolkien's own) doesn't cut it).
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In Annatar's long regurgitation of the excuses and self-justifications PJ and his accomplices offered up on the DVD's, he claims it was 'necessary' to rewrite Faramir (actually to create a new character with the same name) because the real Farmair's was "flat" and had to become an "obstacle" for Frodo- which goes back to the repeated reference by JBW to "story arcs." - If you buy this tripe, I suggest you read Shippey's
Road to Middle-earth in its 2004 edition, where good Prof. Tom takes to task these paint-by-numbers approaches to screenwriting.
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Shelob/Helm's Deep and the relative calendars- Only because PJ was dwetermined to make Helm's Deep the Bam! Zowie! climax of his movie, puffing it up beyond its proper place in the narrative; and, at any rate, Shelob's Lair took place *before* the Pelennor Fields, not simultaneously.
Would it not perhaps have been a great exercise in 'experimental cinema' (in the hands of a much more innovative director than Jackson) to present the narrative just as Tolkien did, without intercutting Books III & IV, V & VI?