PJ on differences between TH and LOTR

I also enjoy the Helms Deep battle, apart from it's already metioned apparent flaws.

I think Jackson managed to give it a real nerve and sense of danger, despite one knowing the result and the scale of it.

If you trim out a few notable deficiencies, it's one of the best battle sequences ever put on film. I've got few of my own to add beyond the obvious.

1. Aragorn lecturing elves on how to treat orcs. Most of these folks are thousands of years old, I'm sure some pipsqueak mortal giving them 'advice' will only annoy them.
2. Theoden telling the handful of soldiers tagging after him to "draw swords". They are walking right into the heat of battle - no shit, sherlock.

Those two things actually bother me more than Legolas surfing or dwarf tossing...I actually kind of enjoyed the latter.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:The damage is done by the time the battle starts.
Pj gives us a very nice scene between Aragorn and Theoden, the "we are not so lucky in our friends as you," speech setting up the overwhelming odds against them nicely and the desperate heroism of the defence they are about to undertake, then it turns out two minutes later they are as lucky in their friends after all

And thats exactly what makes peejers so behind other great directors/producers. He knows how to do the big let down,state the obvious, chokes the anticipation with a very hurried solution. Build the tension, leave the audience hooked & gasping, walk away, jump back in when the time is right. Peejers timing is shat.

Couldn't agree more Azriel. And Id add that he is like an excited kid full of e-numbers who ruins the surprise party by telling the person all about it before they arrive.
Pj is always revealing stuff to the audience way before they should be introduced in the story and ruining their moment.
LotR's when transferred to screen is basically a Road Movie, its a big long journey, and PJ continuously tells the viewer whats coming up on the road ahead before the characters get anywhere near it.

To be fair, it's alot to take in if you haven't read the books. I knew a lot about the characters and their backgrounds just from watching the films. With such a large amount of material I'm not surprised with how much is told to the audience through dialogue. That being said, the dialogue could have been much better than what we got (particularly in the hobbit) and been a bit more artfully done.

I think the way Pj presents the information is more confusing than need be not less.
Take the opening.
It has a big history recap, we get lots of action, a big fight, and people I know who saw it and had never read the books didnt have a clue how it all really fitted in- yeah they got there was a ig bad, and he had the Ring and he lost it and some random bloke took it. But connecting it to how the Ring ended with Bilbo or Frodo or who was involved ect they have forgotten five minutes into the film proper- its just a huge info dump in fancy pants.

Whereas the same info dump given at the appropriate place and broken up slightly into chunks, when Gandalf is explaining it to Frodo makes everything become crystal clear.

I always thought that the prologue was pretty straightforward, sticking as it does with the Ring's physical location for the most part.  That said, I already knew the history of the Ring when I watched the films, so I suppose I can't really judge it's clarity.  My brother never seemed to have any trouble following the Ring's history, but that may be because he'd had to listen to me babble on about LOTR for years by then.  I do know that my mom was pretty confused by a lot of the backstory in LOTR, but then again, she was confused when we started watching Game of Thrones too, and that uses the smaller chunks model of exposition.

Any movie-firsters on here care to weigh in?

I dont think the prologue is incoherent in and of itself. Its more thats its presented with no context and of course there is a big gap, it goes into the River then turns up in a cave with no explanation of what happened in between.
And once you start watching the main film the details of the prologue naturally get forgotten because the information is not given in any context that is directly relevant to Frodo and therefore only seems relevant as background.

I found by restoring that prologue info to Shadow of the Past and including the Gollum stuff it becomes incredibly relevant to Frodo's cry to Gandalf to take the Ring, as the viewer has just seen as Frodo has just heard Gollums tale and what the Ring can do to a creature very like Frodo.
It gives the history context and relevance to Frodo's immediate actions. And makes his decision to keep the Ring and leave the Shire more poignant and heroic.

In response to your first point, I dunno if this part is EE-only, but I'm pretty sure the prologue shows the Ring being picked up from the riverbed while Galadriel says that 2,500 years passed. And that "the creature Gollum" took the Ring into the caves, which is really all you need to know at that point.

I had forgotten about the hand in the river shot. But its the lack of context to the main story that I feel is the main issue.
Instead of it directly affecting Frodo, his reaction and subsequent decision based on what he now knows its utterly separate from it.

Of course you could have decided yourself how well it works at the start versus in Shadow of the Past if you had ever watched the purist edits!

""To be fair, it's alot to take in if you haven't read the books. "".......Tin.
Please dont think me rude, I dont mean to be, & certainly NOT to you Tin !, but, reading the books should not have anything to do with suspense. Peejers should have let the audience get excited all by themselves, work it out all by themselves, gave them something to go 'wow' about, all by themselves. hes like a frigging tour guide, & after a while of " on your right is..." & "on your left is...." anyone would want to throttle him. The audience isnt a bunch of retards !! we CAN decide for ourselves, evolutionary advances means we are just mentally alert enough to work things out & enjoy a bloody film without prompts from an over excited schoolkid trying to big himself up in front of his class mates !

In my case, I saw the movies first before the books. I found the hand holding pretty helpful. Yes, I was 7 or 8 years old so I didn't even care. It's only after watching these films so many times that I notice the anything wrong with the discourse of information. Thinking of the average audience, in any Fantasy medium of storytelling, a good portion is taken up by explaining the world of the story. If (like me) you'd never read the books, then being thrown into the world of Middle Earth without any fore-knowledge of it can make it too complicated to understand. I thought that in terms of information, the movies were fine. Yes, the hand holding gets old really fast, especially after the first viewing. The thing that's different in the Hobbit is that the exposition and prompting is so much less subtle. Ie: When the orc talks about there being one less dwarf while being interrogated as he proceeds to give a detailed description so Tauriel can give a shit (To which Thranduil says "I don't care about one dead dwarf" to which I said "Bless!") It's so blatant and dumb and obvious! In LOTR, I STILL don't understand the whole Arwen/ring thing and I still don't recall any place that says Elrond has foresight, but the movies blend it in pretty seamlessly compared to the clunky conglomeration that became the Hobbit films.