MOVIE SPOILERS!!!!
Well, I agree about Faramir, although I didn't think they said that Osgiliath was the capital in the movie. Maybe I missed that. That whole part about Faramir trying to take Frodo back to Gondor pissed me off. Why couldn't he just show that he was a better person than that like he did in the book? It seems like Jackson doesn't think that people are going to get the whole point about how seductive the ring is if he doesn't show
everyone giving into it at one point or another.
I was also pissed off about the way the Ents behaved. I don't understand why that had to be different. It made the Ents looks stupid, like they didn't know what was going on on the edge of their own forest.
And why wasn't the orc who tried to steal off with Pippin and Merry shown to be a servant of Sauron? Saruman was trying to steal the ring for himself. It seems like that would've been an important thing to show in the movie, that the two evil powers were not acting in harmony, they were competitors in a temporary alliance of convenience. It's one of the things that makes the parallels betwee LotR and WWII so striking.
And why the gratuitous grossness of the cannibalism scene? Weren't the orcs disgusting enough? I don't recall anything in the books about them eating each other, although one might assume they would in a pinch. But why put it in the movie?
Having the Elves show up at Helm's Deep was another irritation. Only two elves from Rivendell ever came to the war, and they showed up after Helm's Deep. If they were going to send help to Rohan from the north, it should've been the company of rangers from the book. Why change it at all? Why send the women and children into Helm's Deep instead of to Meduseld? Why have Aragorn fall off a cliff and float down the river?? Why have Gandalf disagree with Theoden about going to Helm's Deep? Gandalf wasn't stupid enough to send the few men that Theoden had with him to fight a pitched battle with 10,000 orcs and hill men out in the open!! And when Theoden made his last desperate charge out of the keep, I'm sure he had more than just a score of men with him.
On the other hand, I thought the breaching of the walls with explosives piled into the drainage passage
was in the book. It's been a couple of years since I read it, but I've read it several times...
Anyway, I'm not buying the DVDs now. I'll go see the last movie, but this isn't something I'm going to want to watch over and over. I was very disappointed in it.