a laundry list of differences between The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's film version so far

• In a general way: the dialogue. I can't recount every line of the movie, but from lines excusable as compressed exposition ("The ring must be destroyed!") to entirely manufactured speeches that actively misrepresent their speakers ("Men are weak," snarls Smith--Elrond Smith--) to remarks so extraneous as to be bizarre ("but if we stay with each other..." Aragorn says, almost wheedling), the bulk of what is said is freshly minted.
• In the historical sketch at the beginning--inexplicably narrated by Cate Blanchett, maybe just because she has the best voice in the cast--Sauron is overthrown by Isildur, rather than by Elendil and Gil-Galad and their retinue. Elendil is already dead, and Gil-Galad never mentioned, when Isildur, using the broken Narsil (here seemingly his own sword, not his dad's), slashes fingers off Sauron's hand, thereby separating him from the Ring. This, alone, instantly causes the otherwise chipper Sauron to lose his corporeal form for several thousand years. In the text, Sauron is simply beaten, and only then does Isildur harvest the Ring--at the cost of one Dark Finger only--when the fight is over.
• Elves, in deference to a tradition that never had anything to do with Tolkien, have pointed ears. Just for good measure, so do hobbits.
• There's no conspiracy. Merry and Pippin and Sam, rather than taking the initiative to watch out for their friend, are scooped up at random and dragged along on an unplanned, unprovisioned quest they know nothing about. This shorts them all in character, but particularly Merry, who first joins the journey as a reassuring presence who has take the trouble to plan rather a lot of things quite well.
• Frodo, while I'm on the subject, looks like the youngest of the hobbits--he should be substantially older than any of them. More than that, he is an accomplished scholar, someone not out of place in a council of the world's most learned people. The movie is playing him as hapless and naive.
• Merry and Pippin are the respective heirs of the two most powerful families in the Shire. Why are they--particularly Pippin--given salt-of-the-earth accents?
• Merry and Pippin are shown wilfully (and preposterously) interfering in the fireworks display--presumably to introduce them, but only by establishing them as buffoons.
• In order to introduce the idea of Rosie Cotton early, there is a fairly crude exchange wherein Frodo pushes Sam to dance with her--not much akin to the rather Victorian sort of flirtation that is going on between them in the text.
• Gandalf seems never to have known of the ring at all, or suspected its nature, until the Party. (It's unclear whether Frodo knows what the Ring can do; he recognizes it, anyway.)
• No great time seems to pass between Bilbo's departure and Frodo's--though it seems implied, if only by Bilbo's advancing age when later seen in Rivendell, that some time has passed. No time at all passes between Gandalf's return and Frodo's departure--Gandalf himself leads the hobbits from Bag End, parting ways with them out in the woods somewhere.
• No provisioning at all is seen to take place before they go--and certainly none for Merry and Pippin, who are caught in the middle of larking about in the fields in the afternoon.
• Tom Bombadil. An obvious thing, and a huge thing: Bombadil, the Old Forest, and the Barrow-Downs have been left out entirely. A cut is not exactly the same as getting the text wrong, but this is a monumental cut, four chapters in their entirety.
• In Bree, there is no letter from Gandalf waiting, and in fact no other sign or explanation is given at all for the fact that Strider knows all about the hobbits and their errand. He just knows, and they go with him out of a lack of options.
• It is worth noting that the Ring is continually flying through the air in this movie. It gets tossed here in the common room of the Pony, in an abbreviated version of Frodo's big mistake, and then it will get lightly dropped in the snows of a Misty Mountain peak later on. Doesn't Frodo keep the Ring on a sturdy chain around his neck by now?
• Interestingly, the Black Riders themselves are shown stabbing the cushions left in the hobbits' beds, after entering the Pony in force with weapons drawn. Butterbur cowers by the counter as they pass, and if any other patrons are doing the same, one wonders why after so much fuss the Nazgul could possibly believe their hobbits were sleeping peacefully. Beyond this, though, is it really believeable that four or five of them could be gathered together in one room with the Ring itself and not know it? Could they not notice, existing mostly in their wraith world, that no living people were present? In the book itself, the room is merely found savaged the next morning, and the parties responsible could just as easily have been Bill Ferny and the Isengarder as the Nazgul.
• Meanwhile, Gandalf's visit to Isengard is being narrated at greater length than it was originally. Saruman, rather than scheming to subvert Sauron or stop him with his own arts, only darkly intones that they must join Mordor--and then simply beats Gandalf up.
• Later, Gandalf will escape while Saruman is on the roof with him--having sent a message by enchanted moth, which though cool is entirely invented. No explanation is ever offered as to who Gwaihir is; as far as an uninformed audience is concerned, he might very well be the moth.
• Strider carries not only an intact sword but a bow, which is an odd inclusion. When he later uses it, in Moria, no great sign is given us that Legolas is any better with one than he is.
• Events are changed oddly at Weathertop: the fighting goes on at the top of the hill itself, rather than on a slope below, and Strider is absent at the beginning of it. The fire was lit by Sam and put out by Frodo, where in the book Sam grumbles about a fire suggested by Strider. The episode of Gandalf's earlier battle with the Riders has been dropped.
• Here we learn why the Nazgul do not love fire: because they go about drenched in kerosene, seemingly. Mortifying match-lite combat worthy of bad 70s television.
• Soon afterward, Liv Tyler appears, having ousted Glorfindel; she immediately does things Glorfindel never did, riding personally with Frodo across the Bruinen, waving a sword around, and sorcerously bringing the flood about, complete with foaming horses, unassisted. The witch-king, sadly, shows no initiative here, so the Nazgul are undifferentiated.
• Agent Smith, in Rivendell, fumes about the shortcomings of Dwarves and Men, and scowls throughout the council. Bilbo seems to be absent, and Frodo places the Ring on a table in the center of the room--a voluntary surrender, a subtly enormous event, which in fact Frodo never achieves, though he offers it more than once. Meanwhile Legolas is inexplicably the chief agent of exposition here in a meeting that degenerates to squabbling, and Gimli, destined to function chiefly as comic relief, starts swinging weaponry around in the council, attempting to destroy the Ring by hand without waiting for anybody else's input. Finally Frodo, rather than quietly and reluctantly breaking a silence, quells a babbling room by roaring that he will take the Ring, as though he is tired of waiting for someone to ask him. His companions are those who volunteer themselves on the spot, and no further debate seems possible.
• Meanwhile, we have seen the broken Narsil, on exhibit in Rivendell (which, admittedly, makes at least as much sense as Aragorn's having carried it on his person for decades, but is nevertheless a change), but we will never hear then name Anduril or see any sign of a re-forging. Instead the heavy-handed Boromir scene is added.
• Boromir actually gets to hold the Ring in his hands, since Frodo has more or less flung it on the ground. He gives it over voluntarily--that same monumental, nearly unprecedented feat, again--when his chief purpose in the story is to fail to resist its pull.
• Saruman, for reasons I'm having trouble guessing, is explicitly responsible for the extra snows on Caradhras, and is entirely aware of the progress of their quest. In the book, if anyone other than the mountain itself is held responsible, it is Sauron, and not in such a concrete way.
• Saruman also tells us that Gandalf knows what the dwarves woke in Moria. It makes a huge difference if Gandalf knows that in advance. Especially if he then proceeds not to tell anybody.
• Critically, the choice of route is dumped on Frodo here by Gandalf, who makes no effort to explain his desperate-sounding insistence on crossing by the high pass. In the text, mind, it is chiefly Aragorn who opposes entering Moria. In this movie, though, Frodo is made to choose--without being told what a Balrog is, or any other pertinent bit of information. But this decision results in Gandalf's death. Can we begin to imagine the guilt that might fall on Frodo over this?
• The warg attacks are cut, and the party comes instantly to the door of Moria, whose riddle is solved by Frodo, rather than by Gandalf; this involves Frodo, who ought to be a speaker of multiple Elvish languages, asking what the word for friend is.
• At this point they are attacked by Cthulu, or else a surprisingly overfed watcher in the water, with eyes. It not only grasps at Frodo but hauls him into the air like a crane, dangling him there for twenty seconds or so when it could just submerge and drown him, or flip him backward into the water, if it wanted. The various members of the company spend some time whacking at tentacles the size of young trees, free Frodo, and flee inside--to have the magic doors smashed to bits behind them, not merely barricaded.
• In Moria, Gimli crows beyond reason about his confidence that Balin is king of a healthy realm here, only to wail like a goon when the director chooses to make him look stupid (not for the last time).
• Gollum is seen and discussed openly, identified flatly by Gandalf, who then catches up on some of the exposition overlooked in Bag End. (Here, after an unusually long string of verbatim dialogue, the movie's Gandalf states his implicit motto: "follow your nose.")
• The Chamber of Mazarbul. The room looks pretty good, and everything else goes horribly wrong. Gandalf, carelessly perusing a random book from the many lying around, as though flipping through a magazine in a waiting room, lets a bundle of its pages slip unheeded to the floor. Pippin, having had no chance to drop a rock down a hole, here topples an entire dead dwarf into one, piece by piece. As the enemy approaches, Boromir identifies the troll outside, in a tired voice, as though he's seen a hundred. Gimli, who in the text is quick to punish an orc for daring to stand on Balin's tomb, here hops up on it himself to wait for them. And then they come in: the door is shattered, where in the book the troll forced it back slowly, only forcing an arm and a foot inside. There is lots of combat, much of it perpetrated by Merry and Pippin, who ought to be pretty well in over their heads right now (in fact Merry makes a grotesquely apocryphal remark about "getting the hang of this" to underscore his enthusiasm). Then the troll bursts in, smashing a few of its own orcs and much of the masonry, reveling in its own gorgeous animation. Frodo, who is due to be making a watermark display of courage right now, is instead reduced to skulking away from the troll until it pins him cowering in the corner and spears him (a stroke that, delivered by this hand instead of an orc's, ought to pulp his organs whether it breaks through his mail coat or not). While Frodo writhes in slow motion, Merry and Pippin leap on the troll's head and sit there a while, poking knives into its scalp. This looks like suicide, though it is admittedly courageous, arguably as gutsy as Harry Potter confronting his very similar troll. Eventually Legolas, who is plainly a ninja and easily the baddest member of the company, polishes the troll off. Then they run--Gandalf doesn't wait, and the Balrog makes no appearance yet.
• Here I need to make a note about orcs and goblins. In Tolkien these seem to be more or less interchangeable terms, with "goblin" being maybe more colloquial to the Misty Mountains. But Saruman is described as crossbreeding orcs and goblins, not orcs and men, to make his Uruk-Hai (seemingly by cooking them up in a pot, in the end). And here in Moria, creatures are seen swarming headfirst down stone columns, as though a thousand little Gollums were on the heels of the fellowship. What are they? This doesn't sound like orcs as I understand them, and they look nothing like the Uruk-Hai, so my best guess is that this is the movie's idea of a separate race, the goblins.
• In a baffling moment, the company is fully surrounded by an army of whatever they are, at arm's reach, pretty well doomed unless Gandalf (or Legolas) can make with a miracle. But then the Balrog appears, and its minions--or what in the book would be its minions--scatter in a panic, more afraid of it than our heroes are.
• This allows them to flee through a cavern worthy of Super Mario (would anyone build such a space on purpose?), until Gandalf finally has his confrontation with the Balrog. This is more or less faithful, though note Glamdring, since it has never been explained or identified, does not glow (and in fact Sting has forgotten to for most of the time we've been in here). Gandalf hangs out on the bridge long enough to catch his breath and mutter "fly, you fools," instead of shouting it, which makes one wonder whether the Balrog has lost its hold on its whip (which has only one tail if you want to keep track of really petty things), or whether perhaps it is a bungee whip still stretching as the monster falls and Gandalf remains stationary. Or maybe the Balrog is dangling on the other end, waiting for the other shoe, or even grimly hauling itself up again, hand over hand like the Dread Balrog Westley.
• On the road again, hurrying straight to Lorien, The company halts to humiliate Gimli again: he boasts of his alertness before walking into the tip of an arrow in truest Bugs Bunny style. They have been ambushed by a haughty and chubby-faced Haldir, standing on the ground with an entourage of archers. We are reminded that all elves are blondes, which should actually be pretty rare among them. Lothlorien looks like a set from Outer Limits, strangely blue and devoid of sunlight. They only stay for a day, and the events there are abbreviated but not in any large way invented, though as an interpretation they are extreme. Galadriel is so distant and challenging as to be hostile, throughout; a viewer who had not read the book would likely believe that Gimli's description of her as a dangerous witch is pretty much right on.
• Finally the companions take to the river, coming rapidly to a beautiful Tol Brandir (did they find such a perfect place in New Zealand, or did they have to build it?) and stopping to debate their course. Soon Frodo, acting evidently more from a specific fear of Boromir than anything else (fostered by Galadriel's warning, as explicit as "he will try to take it!"), is found missing, and Boromir has overtaken him. Boromir's speech is not much different from the original; Frodo's composure, though, is that of a scared teenager, not the careful, gentle response we see in the book. Frodo sits on Amon Hen, though we have not been told what it is, and instead of looking everywhere merely sees Barad-Dur, which is likely to be taken as simply the effect of wearing the Ring again, since he is treated to a direct address by the Eye of Sauron ("I see you," taunts the Dark Lord in Bree) every time he puts it on. Only when Frodo removes the ring, falling some distance from the seat, can we see the edifice itself in focus.
• Now Aragorn appears, and discusses with Frodo his decision to leave, as well as refusing the Ring directly to show his mettle. Frodo tears off and battle commences with the Uruk-Hai; Legolas and Gimli are here too. Merry and Pippin volunteer for capture to let Frodo get away (which means they know far earlier than they should where he has gone) and Boromir blows his (hitherto unmentioned) appallingly lame-sounding horn and comes to their rescue. Frodo and Sam cross to the Emyn Muil while Aragorn avenges Boromir on the meanest Uruk-Hai of them all--one might have expected him to be Ugluk, until he got his head lopped off. But this is only just punishment for the single dumbest moment of combat in the movie, wherein the Uruk-Hai leader nails Aragorn's head to a tree with the bottom of a shield, thrown through the air. Please, step back and think it over for a second: even this big guy, even given an axe and allowed to take his best shot, would be lucky to penetrate so deeply into the side of a living tree. And if he did manage it, under no circumstances is anybody, heir of Elendil or not, going to bench-press it back out in under two seconds. This, more than any other event in the movie, is purest Conan material. More to the point, though, nobody in the story ever gets the better of Aragorn in combat, let alone so drastically. If that ever happened it would necessarily be a big deal. Here it's a throwaway moment, as though such preposterous things happen in every fight.
• Last, of course, the ending of the book has been pushed well forward through what ought to be the beginning of The Two Towers... which means Jackson will have to start his second movie with all characters on the run, a weird and empty beginning. Unless he just makes something up.

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