The Two Towers extended edition film: I can understand why they left a lot of this stuff out in cinemas

So because I haven't been gaming very much lately, I fill up my free time with other things and it occurred to me recently that although I am a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings films I have never actually seen the extended version or the director's cut of any of them. They are extremely long, about an hour longer than the already long theatrical release but my workload has been rather light lately so it's not like I had anything else to do.

I made my way through "Fellowship" without really noticing right away much of the differences between the film in cinemas and the extended edition. I would have to look them up to find out what those actually were. Things become a lot more noticeable in The Two Towers though and this is through the eyes of someone that hasn't seen that film in probably at least 10 years.

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I am presuming that everyone reading this is already familiar with the story and the film but if you are not stop reading this right now and go and watch the films. There are some very good reasons why all 3 of the films in the trilogy is heavily regarded as some of the best films ever made.

I think the reason why the extra scenes in the 2nd film of the trilogy are more noticeable is because of the fact that the extended edition is nearly a whole hour longer than was seen in cinemas. The theatrical release was already nearly 3 hours long so it is understandable why they needed to "trim the fat" so to speak.

I also feel as though unlike "Fellowship" that some of the omitted scenes are not only not essential to understanding the story, but they are also boring and even kind of stupid. LoTR has some humor here and there that is built in, but entire sections of "Towers" are too long, too in depth, and were pushing for some humor but it simply wasn't funny. Nowhere is this more evident than the forest scenes with Merry and Pippen, the two mucking-about Hobbits that accompany the fellowship on their quest.

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Fatigued from travel having been carried by Treebeard in the forest the two Hobbits fall asleep in the forest. When they awaken Pippen is drinking the water in the stream in the forest. This results in him accidentally speaking Entish and also growing almost immediately a few inches. Merry notices this and not wanting to be shorter than his friend starts to drink some as well. This results in them getting into a scuffle with one another and they end up getting nearly consumed by one of the trees in Fangorn Forest. They are saved at the last minute and survive.

Now the reason why this was included probably has something to do with the fact that the book(s) focused on Fangorn Forest a great deal more than the movie did. However, in the book their growth in height is permanent and in the films it has worn off by the end of the battle at the tower. Perhaps this was because they had another entire film to go through and they didn't want to have to make adjustments for the height of the two characters.

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While some backstory was necessary as far as the Ents are concerned in order to include them in the final assault on Isengard, all of most of what goes on in there is too time consuming and a bit irrelevant to the rest of what is going on. It comes as no surprise that most of this ended up on the cutting room floor. Another reason why I think this footage was discarded in theaters is because despite it being rather revolutionary technology at the time, the scenes where Treebeard is slowly carrying Merry and Pip in Fanhorn looks a bit fake.

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There is a ton of CGI in all of the LoTR films and almost all of it is exceptional. For whatever reason these scenes are kind of an exception especially when compared to other scenes involving fantasy characters that couldn't possibly be recreated by some sort of real thing. Whenever Treebeard or other Ents are in a scene that doesn't include a human actor, they look real... put the two together though, and the background as well as Treebeard himself, appear not quite real.

The other major thing that takes dramatically more screentime on the extended edition as opposed to the theatrical release is the travel and interactions between Frodo, Sam, and Gollum.

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I cant put my finger on exactly what was in theaters and what wasn't but I did notice while watching it that it essentially was too long and a lot of the dialogue wasn't necessary. What we are meant to take away from all of this is the fact that Gollum is going through an internal struggle about whether or not to trust Master Frodo but in the extended edition this goes on entirely too long.

One thing that kind of took away from the flow of the story at hand that is only in the extended cut was doing flashbacks of Faramir that included his brother Boromir and their father who clearly favors Boromir over his younger brother.

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While these scenes are good and given the amount of people in them they must have been very expensive to shoot, they take away from what is truly important in the film at the moment. Their only purpose is to establish that Faramir desperately wants to be worthy in his father's eyes but can't be due to the accomplishments of his older brother. This is summed up just fine in the following film and all it took was a couple of scenes between father and son to establish that. The sequence is probably only 5 minutes long in its entirety, but when you need to "trim the fat" I can completely understand why Mr. Jackson decided to eliminate all of this. Combine the unnecessary element of the story with the fact that Boromir is already dead, and I can understand why they cut all of this.

There was also a scene where Theodon's son is given a burial and Eowyn sings a little song to commemorate his life. Since Theodon's son plays no role in the film at all aside from being dead I can understand why this wasn't in the final cut.

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_{don't worry sweetheart, you'll have plenty of screentime later}

Also, singing in these films was something that always annoyed me and that is a big part of the reason why I didn't like any of the Hobbit films all that much. It is included why? To fill up time? We already have too much of that in this and therefore I am not going to complain about this being eliminated.

There are of course other minor eliminations that took place but the big time-consumers appear above. For one thing, even though it is a minor thing, Aragon's age of 87 is revealed in the extended edition but not in the theatrical one. I'm not sure why they cut that.

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All in all I would say that I enjoyed the extended edition of the Two Towers significantly less than "Fellowship." It's still worth watching if you are a hardcore fan and I do recommend it to all you fellow fantasy nerds out there in internetland.