Great fantasy/adventure movie, small missteps

Rating: 10/10 (30 December 2002)

*Spoilers after first paragraph* (Although how much you could spoil a fifty year old book I am not sure)
I saw Fellowship last year and was absolutely blown away. I hadn't read Tolkien since Jr. High, but it captured everything I liked about the books and even highlighted and expanded some of the central themes. For me, Fellowship of the Ring was one of the best movies ever made--I saw Beautiful Mind once and thought it was nice, but I have watched Fellowship over and over and I am still moved by it. Like many of you, I reread the Lord of the Rings and eagerly looked forward to The Two Towers.
Reading the books may have been a mistake in terms of enjoying the movie. When the book is fresh on your mind, everything that is different from the novel jars you and inhibits your ability to relax and take in the film. For example, I was anticipating the climactic battle with Shelob and I started getting anxious as I realized the film was going in a completely different direction. My main questions/gripes: 1) Tolkien's relationship with nature is one of the hallmarks of his work and I felt that Jackson unnecessarily minimized the Ents by making them appear foolishly out of touch with nature. What was gained by having Merry trick Treebeard instead of having Treebeard come to his own conclusions based on his supernatural relationship with Fanghorn forest and the damaged being caused it by Sauruman. 2)Frodo wandering up to the Ringwraith and holding up the ring made no sense--why did the Wraith just fly around aimlessly once it had seen the Ring? Was it scared of the way Sam knocked Frodo down the stairs and it feared it would suffer the same fate? Frodo and Sam had time for a nice conversation, but the Wraith was somehow unable to just fly down and pick them up. 3)Farimir quickly deciding to free both of them and their potential weapon with little obvious reason for doing so. I can't see how any of these changes helped the movie--please e-mail me if you have insights.
However, these gripes all stem from a jarring of expectations set up by the book. Otherwise, I thought the character of Aragorn in particular was nicely portrayed, and the battle scenes were superb. Gollum surpassed expectations. This movie also caught the same Shakespearian themes introduced in the first one--we all suffer from greed, lust for power, and jealousy, but the most common person can stand up to the greatest human foibles.
I will be looking forward to next December for the scene with Shelob--and I hope Jackson slows down the pace a bit for more reflective scenes that made Fellowship such a great movie. Fellowship rated a perfect 10--the Two Towers gets an 8.5 or 9.