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Deleted scenes are deleted for a reason.

Maybe this is controversial, but I felt Peter Jackson got a little carried away with the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings.

Now, I *love* Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but with the exception of The Two Towers I find the cinema version vastly superior to the extended cut.

For all the ‘missing’ scenes they add, they don’t make the story any better and pacing goes out the window… All they end up doing is pander to the die-hard Tolkien fans that were never going to be satisfied anyway with anything less than a word-for-word adaptation.

It’s telling that writing this I can’t actually remember any scene from the extended Fellowship or Return except for the Bilbo-narrated intro which replaced the much more interesting scene between Gandalf and Frodo. And I only remember it because it annoyed me so much.

Towers I liked, because here was a scene – the capture of Osgiliath – that was not only entertaining in itself, but significantly added to three of the major characters in the story, exploring the relationship between brothers Boromir and Faramir, and their father Denethor. A few other scenes stood out (the burial song, the exchange between Sam and Gollum in the sewers), but this one sequence really showed the difference between adding and padding…

If you’ve got a scene that doesn’t help the narrative or develop the main characters, or worse, states the blindingly obvious… it probably shouldn’t be in there.