Brief comment on LOTR: TTT (EE)

Although I haven't had time to plough my way through all the extras, I did take time out to watch the film itself. Jackson has added about 43 minutes of extra material, ranging from new scenes to dialogue inserts. I'd say Jackson's editing instincts are excellent: most of the new material falls into the "nice but slows down the film" category.* The comic relief scenes--Merry and Pippin drinking the Entdraught, Aragon attempting to choke down Eowyn's stew--are rather heavy-handed and jarring. The dramatic moments are better, especially Faramir's flashback to Boromir and his father (which fleshes out his character considerably) and the new ending to the Battle of Helm's Deep (which explains what happened to all those orcs...). Gandalf and Saruman get additional dialogue--mostly exposition, in Gandalf's case--and Sam's attitude to Gollum has been altered slightly.

*--Incidentally, this is why I can't get particularly worked up about Saruman's death landing on the cutting room floor: I'm quite willing to believe that Jackson is right about the death scene disrupting the narrative. Since Jackson eliminated the Scouring of the Shire, there really isn't a logical place to kill Saruman; the event doesn't fit into either Aragorn's or Frodo's remaining storylines. In any event, I'm not a fan of the original novel--the last time I admitted that in class, a student threatened me with a Legolas figurine :) --and so the alterations in and of themselves don't bother me.