...well, here's what going past the Pillars of the Argonath is like in the text of J. R. R. Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring:
Sheer rose the dreadful cliffs to unguessed heights on either side. Far off was the dim sky. The black waters roared and echoed, and a wind screamed over them...The chasm was long and dark, and filled with the noise of wind and rushing water and echoing stone. It bent somewhat towards the west so that at first all was dark ahead; but soon Frodo saw a tall gap of light before him, ever growing. Swiftly it drew near, and suddenly the boats shot through, out into a wide clear light.
it's dark and windy and scary and that's the point, because Aragorn strikes a kingly figure amid the fear.
and here's what Peter Jackson and his gang made it look like:
it's some boats floating placidly through a CGI theme-park ride. if you look at the images carefully, you'll see that they didn't even bother to make the front of the Argonath models consistent with how they look from behind (look at the position of their arms.)
garbage. just...garbage. Peter Jackson ruined movies with this crap. now everything's a CGI theme-park ride.
~Chara
there's something I've never quite been able to accept about Peter Jackson's approach to adapting The Lord of the Rings, which is: I was never going to get David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia or Kurosawa's Ran or Seven Samurai, or...well, pick some other tremendous epic-length movie that nevertheless maintains a highly personal focus—there's action in all three of the films I've mentioned, but the great strength of these films is their quiet, character-driven moments.
I wanted THAT from a Lord of the Rings movie, because that's the sort of story Tolkien tells. he doesn't fear bringing his narrative to a near-halt for two or three chapters in order to immerse the reader in a different world, one far more peaceful and harmonious than the world outside. there's fighting and violence, yes, but as abrupt and drastic interruptions of life. think of how much more grim the Siege of Gondor is, in Tolkien's text, because he pauses first to give us one day of Pippin running around Minas Tirith with Bergil and feeling almost at home after a while—yet more friendship in strange places—and of course in Peter Jackson's action spectacular there's none of that because he's got to get straight to war and battles and showing off all the intricate set-design and costuming and animation and everything.
I don't think it ever needed to be this way; I reject the assumption that the huge length of Tolkien's text necessitated the herky-jerky pacing of Jackson's adaptation—and I point to better movies, epics that have time for peace and quiet and letting the characters breathe instead of merely lashing them onward through a string of arguments and action scenes.
I think Peter Jackson blew it, big time—if the point was respectful adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien. If I didn't know that Jackson and his team have supposedly talked at length about how they really thought they were doing a great job of adapting Tolkien, in all that ancillary material I've yet to see, I'd guess they were doing a purely cynical hack-job: boiling down The Lord of the Rings to the same cack-handed Hero's Journey formula that they use for everything these days. (Tim Burton managed to make a cack-handed Hero's Journey out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. How did THAT happen?!)
~Chara