Better execution than the second Harry Potter movie, anyway. (I'll rant on that later.)
I thought the Eowyn/Aragorn tension was okay. In the book she falls for him to such a degree that when he leaves for the Paths of the Dead, she determines to lose her life in battle.
At least they didn't do what I'd feared - especially after seeing the "Aragorn and his two ho's" TTT poster - which was having Arwen ride down leading the grey company and getting into a cat-fight with Eowyn.
I think TTT was the first time in my life I've noticed a glitch in a movie the first time through. Normally, my superlative powers of suspension of disbelief allow me to get into the story enough that I don't notice anything. Analysis comes later. Anyway, in the scene where Theoden is arming at Helm's Deep, it seems to me there is a close up of him being fitted with some (Boromir-style) gauntlets. In the room shot immediately following, he doesn;t have them. Was I mis-perceiving this? Between that and Aragorn's little arming scene, I felt like it was a take off on a Schwartzenagger movie.
The changes I was less than thrilled with: Dwarves are comic relief. Except for Aragorn, you can't trust humans to be noble or competent (as per reworking of Theoden and Faramir). Entish hypocrasy - after all the talk about not being hasty and not taking sides, Treebeard sees a few burnt trees, has a conniption fit and snap calls out the ents who instantly respond. The horse charge downhill (a wee bit steep to my mind) onto the waiting pikes seemed off enough that it knocked me out of the story for a bit.
I can understand why they cut off the movie where they did. The story part of Return of the King is relatively short - a good portion of the book is appendices. This allows the length of the three films to be more balanced. (With Fellowship shortened by losing the entire Old Forest section amongh other things.) Though Shelob does make for a great cliffhanger ending.
And they need some extra stuff for RotK. According to the commentary on the FotR DVD, they are leaving out the Scouring of the Shire from the third film. The scenes in Galadriel's glass are Jackson's "homage" to that part of the book.
One friend - who finds the movie treatment frustrating - told she felt that director was trying not to do "JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings" but "Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings". It kinda seems that way to me, too.
Now, on to Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets...
What can I say but "Thank goodness Chris Columbus won't be directing the third movie!"?
I'm afraid Chamber of Secrets exceeded his capacity for plot and character development. I can just see him holding out his hands as if weighing two possibilities. "Hmm. Should I retain the plot details and character nuances from the books? Or should I just throw in some more footage of CGI monsters? Hey Charlie! Crank up the SGI boxes, we need to render some spiders. Lots of spiders. Show them for not letting me direct Eight Legged Freaks like I wanted!"
I'd have cut out at least half the spider scene and maybe half of the baskilisk footage. Argh! As in Fellowship orf the Ring, we have a scene where a Scar Evil Monster is distracted by a naive young hero who throws a rock at a Critical Moment. Honestly! Doesn't anyone around here read! It talks about this quite plainly in the evil overlord's no-no list at http://www.eviloverlord.com !
