I'm glad they took creative liberties. A lot of great scenes in the movies are dumb as fuck in the books and the books are full of laboriously boring endless meandering unfocused nonsense that goes on for pages.

The entire battle in the Chamber of Mazarbul is, I think, literally all of a page and a half. Weathertop is 3/4 of one page (EDIT: I asked ChatGPT and it said Weathertop was more detailed, so I may have it backwards).

The troll only puts his foot in the door and Frodo stabs it and it fucks off and is never seen again.

They're all worrying and Gandalf is holding the door, and then they go 'Oh there's another exit' and they just... leave. It honest to god felt like one of those shitty radio plays or old Republic Serials, where they end every episode on a major cliffhanger, and then the next episode resolves the cliffhanger in an incredibly unsatisfying way. You see the heroes get on their space ship and fly away and then it explodes into pieces. The narrator says "Kazzak's ray beam just struck the space ship and it exploded into a million pieces! This is the end of our heroes!" and then the next episode begins with a scene the audience didn't see of Spaceboy and Wunderman strapping on jetpacks and jumping out, and then the ship explodes behind them.

In this case, "Oh no! Our heroes are in a dead end and the orcs of Moria are on the march! What happens next!" and then in the next episode there's just a back door nobody mentioned or saw before, and they just leave.

That's it. That's the whole battle. There's an actual line that stuck with me, and it's "Aragorn and Boromir slew many." I'm pretty sure that's the line word for word. Their big life-or-death battle deep in the Mines of Moria and Tolkien's descriptive prowess could only go as far as "[they] slew many."

I could just picture Tolkien packing a pipe and going, "Fill in the blanks yourself you fuckwits, I didn't have time to paint you a word picture because I was busy spending nine pages describing the foliage in Lothlorien."

The books are full of imagination and wonderment and has great ideas but I'll be honest, Tolkien was a completely dogshit author. I read the book as a kid, saw the movies, and then read the books again, and I'm gonna be real - Jackson did the entire thing better than Tolkien in every way. Cutting out trash like the Barrow Wights and Tom Bombadil made the story better.

Even Tolkien never bothered to explain Tom Bombadil, and he wrote the fucking thing.