At Last! A forum with a thread that I can comment on in detail! I absolutely hated the EE scene of Gandalf and the Witch-king.
But alas, I really cannot add to what all you marvelous fans have already nailed it on the head.
First of all, there is no way in Middle-Earth that the Witch-king could have defeated Gandalf so easily. There is a very, very slight possibility that he could have beaten him, but not effortlessly. It is an impossible for the White Wizard, a Miear (sp) spirit to be defeated by a corrupt sprit of a Man. I love the Witch-king as much as the next person, but that was just going overboard. This scene has got to be the worst scene out of the entire movie series. And it really hurts, because PJ and his team worked so tirelessly to bring u an extremely well scripted adaptation of our beloved books, but they just threw this scene away completely. I realize that they added/subtracted/altered certain things in the movies to make things more clear and fluid without losing the overall message of the books. But all this scene did was take away! Us fans really don't have a lot to pain over, becuase we know Gandalf's true strength. But what about countless fans who are only fans of the movie. They will go the rest of their lives thinking of Gandalf (the White, no less) as a weak old man.
They should have just cut it out completely even in the EE, if it was going to turn out the way it did. All it does is make Gandalf extremely weak and helpless, and make the Witch-king far too powerful (and foolish, because he could have finished off his greatest adivisary right then and there) . Actually, I thought that throught ROTK, Gandalf seemed less powerful, less assertive, and less determined then he ought to have, but that scene was just the worst and most rediculous. It almost ruinded the entire move experience, and not just for ROTK. It almost shows how careless they were in some of these scenes. In fact what made me stop myself from hating the movies that I have come to love, were all the things that they did get right. But a slip-up of this caliber is almost unforgivable. Actually I really wouldn't have minded the breaking of the staff if Gandalf had actually tried to do something about it. What would have salvaged the scene was if Gandalf had gotten up off the ground, instead of flailing there like a beaten old man, and start to glow a pale white and unsheath Glamdring. Or they could have made it exactly like they did in the book where they just face each other with the utmost tension. Now that I have gotten it all out of my system, I beleive I shall do what Essex said, and live with it. From what I've read from the comments on this thread, there are a few exceptional and beleivable explanations about this scene. But this severe lapse in film-making judgement does make the Witch-king's death a little sweeter, and I almost completely forgot about the whole Gandalf/Witch-king scene when Aragorn and Gimli kill Gothmog.
