Peter Jackson's interpretation of The Lord of the Rings

They have admired Jackson's ability to film the long and complex work at all; the beauty of the cinematography, sets, and costumes; the quality of the music; and the epic scale of his version of Tolkien's story.

The development of fan films such as Born of Hope and The Hunt for Gollum, and of a modern folklore with characters such as elves, dwarves, wizards, and halflings, all derived from Jackson's rendering of Tolkien, have been viewed as measures of this success.

[8] Saruman's death shown, relocated to Isengard, in extended version[16] There are several reasons why a film-maker would need to make alterations while adapting the source text of The Lord of the Rings to a screenplay,[17] not least its length.

[26] As Joseph Ricke and Catherine Barnett write, "Tolkien's characters … – like the narrative in which they exist – pause often for reflection, lamentation, poetry, song, moral inventory, refocusing, wrestling with their consciences, and debating their commitment to the mission before them.

In his view, Jackson was obliged to address different audiences, including teenagers who expected Arwen to have some of the characteristics of a "warrior princess", and who delighted in jokes about Dwarf-tossing, something that, he commented, Tolkien would not have understood.

[21] The early chapters "A Conspiracy Unmasked", "The Old Forest", "In the House of Tom Bombadil", and "Fog on the Barrow-Downs", all of which concern a deviation on the hobbits' journey from their home in the Shire to the village of Bree, are essentially omitted completely, though brief mentions of these are made later.

[14] The penultimate chapter "The Scouring of the Shire", in which the hobbits use the skills of leadership and warfare that they have acquired to cleanse their home region of the enemy, is omitted,[16] although a vision of it is seen by Frodo in the Mirror of Galadriel.

[30] An addition to Tolkien's main text that critics felt worked well is the incorporation of an appendix, "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", as a secondary plot line on the "bittersweet love affair" between a man, one of the heroes of the film, and an immortal Elf.

[31] The entire episode is a digression from the main story; Shippey suggested it was inserted to provide more of a role for the beautiful but distant Elf-woman Arwen, who helps to bring Aragorn back to life.

[21] Jackson decided to make use of some of the "history" (events long before the main action of The Lord of the Rings, described in the appendices and recalled in dialogue in the Council of Elrond, midway through the first volume) in a dramatic film prologue.

She suggests that the changes reflect Joseph Campbell's "heroic 'monomyth'" in which the hero ventures into a supernatural realm, fights strange forces, wins, and returns with enhanced power.

The scholar of literature Victoria Gaydosik notes that the screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens joke about "crimes against the book" on the extended edition DVD, and investigates the transformation of Arwen in the films.

[25] Critics and scholars have largely agreed that the film makes fine use of visual imagery and music to convey an impression of Middle-earth, from the New Zealand landscapes to the use of casting, costumes, prosthetics and digital effects to create characters and action.

[8] The Tolkien scholar Kristin Thompson noted that "even the film's harshest critics" agree that its design elements, including its music, which was composed by Howard Shore, are "superb".

[35] The final song, "Into the West", sung by Annie Lennox to Shore's music with lyrics by Fran Walsh, "intriguing[ly]" modulates the end of the last film "to a tone closer to that of the novel", write Judy Ann Ford and Robin Anne Reid; its lyrics speak of "weeping, shadows, and fading", counteracting the image of dazzling light presented by the film, and echoing the note of pessimism and doubt in Tolkien's ending.

She cites Jackson's remark that Tolkien's "music" is "imaginary", objecting only that his Gregorian chanting of "Namárië" and his "dramatic" performance of "Ride of the Rohirrim" give "a glimpse" of how he imagined his songs might have sounded.

[20] Christopher Tolkien, editor of his father's Middle-earth manuscripts, stated that "The Lord of the Rings is peculiarly unsuitable to transformation into visual dramatic form",[43] and that the films had "eviscerated" the book.

[8] In his view, the "orgy of Orc killing" at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring made the film quite implausible; Jackson continually "minimizes mood development and dialogue, and offers seemingly nonstop flights and fights"; and "the significance of Frodo's inner journey becomes submerged in frenetic action".

[19] The independent scholars and publishers Anthony S. Burdge and Jessica Burke make use of Frye's classification of literary modes to argue that the film interpretation "fails miserably" in one of what they consider Tolkien's major achievements, to "[resurrect] images of the hero.

Where Tolkien's Denethor is a cold ruler doing his best for his country, Jackson's is made to look greedy and self-indulgent: Shippey calls the scene where he gobbles a meal, while his son Faramir has been sent out in a hopeless fight, a "blatant [use] of cinematic suggestion".

It gave as an instance the reduction of Tolkien's sadly conflicted Gollum to a "pathetically comic and merely devious figure", and the caricaturing of the powerful Steward of Gondor, Denethor, as "a snarling and drooling oaf rather than a noble pessimist".

In her view, the cinematography successfully mirrors the text, except when Frodo and Sam are approaching Mordor, where Reid found the film "perfunctory in its construction of Ithilien compared to earlier scenes".

Against that, she considered that the lighting of the beacons to summon the riders of Rohan to Gondor, a lengthy scene at 98 seconds, "exceeds the impact of the novel because of the cinematic narrator's ability to move away from a single character's point of view to dramatize the event".

They preserved Tolkien's dialogue wherever they could, sometimes moving lines to a different time, place, or character, as when Gandalf makes a speech in the Mines of Moria before arriving at Balin's tomb, whereas, in the book, the words are spoken in Frodo's home in the Shire, before he sets out.

[35] Selling found that the transformations, such as the substitution of the Elf-lady Arwen for the Elf-lord Glorfindel in The Fellowship of the Ring, were mainly successful, but that the omission of the entire Tom Bombadil sequence was more damaging.

[23] In her view, he allowed himself "unusually free reshuffling"[23] of scenes to simplify the chronology, but managed to build the Tolkienesque themes of "providence, eucatastrophe [sudden happy reversal], interconnectedness"[23] through skilful intercutting and use of music.

She writes that "a surprising number" of lines of dialogue survive in the films, though often transposed, continuing a process begun by Tolkien, who as his son Christopher notes,[51][52] often moved conversations into fresh contexts, voiced by different speakers.

It further alludes to Jackson's trilogy, Alberto writes, with techniques such as "accelerated exposition" and an unseen narrator of "ancient story" speaking over "sweeping location shots, battle scenes, and details from a character's life".

[38][22] Fimi compares Jackson's representation of Gildor's party of Elves riding through the Shire "moving slowly and gracefully towards the West, accompanied by ethereal music" with John Duncan's 1911 painting The Riders of the Sidhe.

Fimi commented that the more embodied form for the Dead Men probably prevailed because they had to fight a battle (for the Corsair's ships); she noted that Jackson's first successes as a director were horror films.