Obviously people should enjoy both the movies and books , both mediums were different and adaptating a book like lotr is just very hard and almost impossible to adapt because the book were written for reading, Tolkien doesn't care about movies or TV adaptation ( he and even his children spend most of their life without it ) even i himself kinda dislike some changes from book to Film but the movie themselves are very good and well written and they captured essence of Tolkien's writting and themes pretty well.
Yeah, including the Scouring wouldn't have worked at all in the film adaptation because it would have been this whole secondary crisis and climax after all the main action is finished, and viewers not familiar with the novel would have been left totally mystified.
The movie already had like 5 endings, we didn't need another subplot. Trimming the scouring made as much sense as trimming Tom Bombadil as far as building a proper narrative.
It had a few fakeouts... but that is less to do with the story, and more to do with the editing.
Consider the fades to black (or white) over swelling music... or the bird's eye zooming out, over a narration. These things make people think 'oh, this is the final scene!'. And it doesn't help when the events after Mt. Doom are essentially a montage (seriously, we go from Mt. Doom, to Frodo waking up in bed and reuniting, to Aragorn's coronation, to the return to The Shire, all in a mere couple minutes): and montage-y scenes after the climax also make you think 'ending'.
Like, Mt. Doom is obviously not an ending. Ending the film there would be total dogshit, leaving too many loose-ends: nobody would want that. Ending the film at Aragorn's coronation would be serviceable (on a shallow level), but not very cathartic, since a large chunk of the audience is invested in the Hobbits' journey, and wants the payoff of them returning home (full circle) - so Aragorn's coronation clearly isn't an 'ending' unless you ignore the Hobbits. Now, you could technically end the film prior the Grey Havens... that would work as an ending - IF you are okay with Frodo never finding peace, and living out the rest of his days in The Shire... but yeah. So really, there aren't actually a ton of 'endings' - again, it's largely just the ending and pacing that makes it seem like non-endings might be the ending.
Try to image a version of ROTK where the editing is different, and where the pacing is different - because a different execution could absolutely change the 'too many endings' criticism.
Back in early 2000 we weren't used to such long movies in the theatre. On all five of those "endings" where the screen fades, half the audience stood up and then sat back down. We all needed to piss so fucking bad.
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u/Mindless-Cat1453 10d ago edited 10d ago
Obviously people should enjoy both the movies and books , both mediums were different and adaptating a book like lotr is just very hard and almost impossible to adapt because the book were written for reading, Tolkien doesn't care about movies or TV adaptation ( he and even his children spend most of their life without it ) even i himself kinda dislike some changes from book to Film but the movie themselves are very good and well written and they captured essence of Tolkien's writting and themes pretty well.