Well I went back to see it again since I had an idea of what to expect. I liked it better the second time when I wasn't hoping for a particularly faithful adaptation of the book.

Still can't understand why they made some of the changes though. Why leave out the words that brought Boromir to Rivendell? Why put the fight with the cave troll in the mines? If you want a dramatic fight why not use the one in the book with the wargs? Why have the characters wobbling around forever on a piece of crumbling masonry? Why bring the palantir in so soon and destroy any mystery or uncertainty about where exactly Saruman stands? He may be controlled by Sauron but he believes that he is still working for his own interests.

I think dentists all over the world should hail this as a major breakthrough though. A persistent message in the film is that moral decay and dental decay are linked. So keep brushing mudcatters!

On this second viewing I started to wonder if the actor who played Pippin shouldn't have been Frodo and Frodo shouldn't have been Pippin. It seems the actor playing Pippin has the ability to shift expressions three times in the time it takes Frodo to alter once.

A lot of the people I hear being enthusiastic about this retelling are people who haven't actually re-read the book in many years. I still think Peter Jackson Conanized the story. It seems strange to me to create a movie of a book but not trust the book that has kept many readers enthralled for years to tell the story. Compression is necessary and understandable but substituting extra fight scenes and banal dialogue for what the book writes is silly and in no way lives up to the vaunted and advertised desire to be faithful to the book itself.