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But Jackson deliberately downplays the deeply grounded Catholic faith that imbues Tolkien's pre-Christian epic with profound Christian concerns. In making the hellish mêlée the movie's grand climacteric, Jackson fails to demonstrate the real moral impetus behind the willingness of the Company to enter this terrible combat against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy. Unlike the movie, the book convinces us that the hobbits and their friends are bound by unbreakable ties of friendship and sacrifice. Not only do they trust each other implicitly; they also have a shared faith in an unfailing guide (the wizard Gandalf) as well as undying devotion to a transcendent good (the destruction of the Ring). Rather like the early disciples of Jesus, they are a communion of the unlike—including such historic enemies as a dwarf and an elf. Even though they have been splintered into three sub-groups, they still function as mini-communities maintaining a profound solidarity with each other. Always they know that their companions, wherever they are, look eastward to Mount Doom, since Sam and Frodo are struggling toward this pernicious place where alone their mission can finally be accomplished.
Jackson fails to comprehend not only the mystery of goodness that Tolkien so convincingly embodies but the mystery of iniquity as well. Already in the first installment, Jackson chose to make the wizard Saruman into a figure of instant and uncomplicated evil, when in fact Tolkien depicts him as a wise and eloquent figure who gradually became deluded by his desire to employ the evil Ring to accomplish his own idea of the good. In The Two Towers, Jackson turns Saruman's lieutenant Grima Wormtongue into an equally obvious avatar of malice. Because there is nothing subtle about Grima's machinations, why would a wise king such as Théoden have been seduced by him? Instead of answering the enigma he poses, Jackson elects to make Théoden spookily inhabited by the spirit of Saruman, and to have Gandalf perform an even spookier exorcism on him. King and wizard alike are thereby demeaned.
The movie also fails to reveal why Frodo is so terribly burdened by his bearing of the Ring. It rightly shows him to be weary and exhausted and discouraged for possessing Sauron's vile instrument, but only once in the movie is Frodo actually tempted to put it on. For Tolkien, the constant temptation to wear the Ring is what makes its power so corrupting and debilitating. Repeatedly in the novel, Frodo longs to use the Ring in order to escape from a crisis or to solve a problem. Here we are given little more than poignant sighs and grimaces from Frodo, though Sam is convincingly shown to be his sturdy and loyal companion.
Surely Jackson's most egregious concession to spectacle over agon lies in his decision to omit the return of the Company to Isengard, Saruman's fortress, after their victory over Saruman's forces at Helm's Deep. Gandalf is determined to proffer mercy to the chief malefactor—to open the prison doors of Saruman's sin by urging him to repentance and reconciliation. Saruman refuses the path of freedom, alas, and remains enslaved to his own desire for power. Yet this refusal serves but to reinforce the Christian leitmotif of Tolkien's entire epic: pity. In pagan cultures, whether ancient or recent, mercy is granted only to the weak and helpless, never to the strong and undeserving, lest they be denied justice. For Tolkien the Christian and Augustinian, the injustice of the powerful cannot be broken by force but only by mercy and grace. And because evil is a perversion and distortion of the good—never having any positive existence of its own—no creature in The Lord of the Rings lies beyond redemption. Not even Sauron was evil in the beginning.
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