People. . .the last 5 chapters are not MISSING.

Rating: 10/10 (30 March 2003)

I commented on this film a long time ago; and while I did have a few issues with some discrepancies between the book and the film (especially Faramir), one thing I never expected to be a problem for anyone was Peter Jackson's ending THIS STAGE of his overall 3-PART FILM when he did. Folks, the relationship of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers to the Return of the King is not the same as the relationship between, say, the Raiders of the Lost Ark to the Temple of Doom to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Tolkien himself only split up his saga of the Lord of the Rings into 3 books because his publisher told him it would never sell as one huge one. Peter Jackson simply split his large work a different 3 ways than Tolkien did, and I don't blame him. This movie is about 3 hours as it is (and I can only imagine the length of the Director's Cut, which by the way I hope they won't wait till November to issue this time). And while they could have cut some of the extraneous Aragorn/Arwen bits, the time they would have saved would never be enough time to do justice to what happens in the final 5 chapters of the book. Also, remember: The Return of the King is shorter by over a hundred pages, in terms of the story, than either of the first two. Peter Jackson is actually distributing the story more evenly than Tolkien did. The only "unfair" thing about what he's done, is that now the "Return" film will have all the best, scariest, and most awful bits to itself. Oh well. I can't wait for December.
(P.S. By the way, I didn't see anyone complaining when Peter Jackson tacked the first half of the first chapter of the Two Towers onto the end of the Fellowship film.)