Great adaptation, but one flaw

Rating: 10/10 (16 November 2003)

Peter Jackson and company has done an incredible job of bringing Tolkien's vision to the screen. They have accomplished what I originally thought impossible. I first read The Lord of the Rings almost 30 years ago, and I felt the books were unfilmable with the then current technology. Even with today's state-of-the-art CGI, I still felt that the LOTR could not be filmed properly, unless the people making the film had a great understanding and love for the source material. It is obvious from watching the films that Peter Jackson, et al, has a great awareness and compassion for Tolkien's work.
I realize the immense differences between the two mediums of the written page and films and the challenges adapting one from the other. So I accepted the changes in the movies weighed against the books without much grievance, i.e.: Tom Bombadil's absence; Faramir's personality change; Frodo & Sam in Osgiliath; the presence of the elves at Helm's Deep; Arwen's expanded presence; even the silliness of Gimli's character, etc.
But there is one element of the movies that disturbs me. It's the films treatment of the `ring' itself. This is where I get to be a LOTR geek, so bear with me! In the books, Sauron never had a psychic connection with the ring as it's portrayed in the films, so he's never certain who the ringbearer is. Frodo never sees an `eye' when he puts on the ring, and vice versa. This is a major plot device in the books, especially in The Return of the King, where Aragorn is in possession of Saruman's palantiri, and uses it deliberately to allow Sauron to track Aragorn's whereabouts and thereby deceiving Sauron into thinking he had the ring. In so doing, Sauron's attention was averted from Mordor where Frodo and Sam were able to enter virtually undetected.
Thus far in the films, Sauron knows exactly who and where the ringbearer is, and that makes it impossible for the ringbearer to enter Mordor unnoticed. I see this as the one major flaw in Peter Jackson's visualization of LOTR and I hope this problem is resolved in The Return of the King.