inb4 book fans are idiots.Originally Posted by Forsaken Lover
For your continued learning, the Silmarillion goes a lot further in describing the origins of the spirits that rank higher than Elves and Men. Balrogs, as Maiar level spirits, can take the shape of whatever they want, provided that whatever damage they take in that form can't be magicked away. Even if Balrogs have undamaged wings, there's no guarantee that they can fly, because they just might not have the lift needed to get them off of the ground. Even if he could fly after falling into a giant underground lake, and fighting his way to the top of a mountain against a spirit equal in power (Gandalf is a Maia), where is he going to fly to? Italy?
Further examples of inability to heal: the ruling hand has four fingers; the bat bleeds all over while fleeing Tol-in-Gaurhoth; never seeing Sauron in fair form after the start of the Third Age.
It's stated pretty explicitly in the books that the curse only bound them for one battle. In the books, there's only one they needed to fight in, at Pelargir, which gave them an effective way of transporting Northern reinforcements. There were more defenders at Minas Tirith in the book, so there wasn't much of a need for the Dead Army there. Maybe if they had not removed 90% of the country, things could be different.
The magic is also not strong enough to clean out Mordor. Consider the source of the level of sorcery required to keep these figures in check: a noble/king of Gondor cursing a few thousand men for about a thousand years, the source of which is dead, versus a Maia enslaving an army of living people on his own and maintaining nine Nazgul and their Rings of Power. It does not compare.
In addition, they also had to compress the timelines. What is supposed to happen over the course of a few days is instead, told in the span of less than an hour. No amount of altering the background to give the impression of passing time can change that, and it is a flaw of movies as a form of media. If they wanted to portray it accurately, the actual battle would have been extremely slow, plenty of downtime, no sense of urgency at all. Most wars are not started and ended in the span of a few hours. I don't know how much you liked the Faramir scenes where he's actually shown strategizing attack patterns, but Return would have been littered with them, and the movie would have risked feeling like a History Channel documentary.
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One thing about the movies that have bothered me, is that the Middle Earth that's painted in Peter Jackson's vision feels extremely underpopulated. It isn't. Sure one can point out "hey it's a movie," and that it is difficult to fill in that information for the viewer at a glance, but there was a lot more that the crew could have done to fill in some of the blanks.
This gives this impression that the world will end even if Sauron loses, simply because the Elves are going away. Very "this is the final battle" sort of feel. Only some of the Elves are going away. The native Elves of Lorien and Mirkwood have no reason to travel West. because that's not where home is for them. Granted, this makes life a lot easier for the filmmakers, and I am not sure they could have pulled off such an adaptation otherwise. It definitely would have compromised how Arwen was portrayed in the trilogy, and taken a significant amount of emotion from the character and her decision-making process.
If it makes anyone feel better, I actually liked the Appendices more than the actual movies.
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