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Jackson has omitted many key scenes that show Aragorn's kingly qualities. There is no suggestion of the King's tireless healing of the sick and wounded; these are passages where Tolkien has inserted an unusual number of biblical hints evoking the example of Christ. We are deprived of any examples of Aragorn's Solomonic wisdom, as for instance in the honorable discharge given to the young conscripted soldiers who panic at the sight of Mordor, and in the reassignment of Beregond in a way that punishes him and yet rewards him also. We do not learn of Aragorn's perilous confrontation with Sauron in the palantí r, so we do not know the full story of his self-sacrificing courage. Nor do we see Aragorn in counsel with Gandalf and the other leaders of the Free Peoples after the battle of the Pelennor, so we have little sense of him as a leader among leaders. None of these omissions would be serious alone, but taken together they add up to a significant reduction of Aragorn's majesty.

The most serious of all Jackson's alterations, however, occurs at the climax, the all-important dé nouement that, for Tolkien, was the key to the entire structure (he called it the "eucatastrophe"). Jackson's decision to have Frodo become, in a sense, the master of his own fate, more than anything else, has convinced many Tolkienians that Jackson does not understand the underlying themes of the book.

Speaking theologically, the remarkable and paradoxical thing about Tolkien's achievement is that he has so much to say about God without saying anything about God. All through the book there is this pervasive sense of a greater Mind, a greater Author, directing the events and working through human agents for a larger purpose than any of them can divine. Tolkien accomplishes this largely through syntax, frequently using the passive form of verbs ("Frodo was meant to have the Ring," "time was given" to Aragorn), and through veiled references to "some other power," "some other will". This would have been very difficult to convey in a movie, but the deliberate decision of the director to demystify the dé nouement at the Cracks of Doom has derailed Tolkien's entire theological project. Not least among the disappointments here is that the care lavished upon the creation of the cinematic Gollum ultimately goes for nothing (nothing theological, at any rate) because we never see the awakening of his love for Frodo, and the mercy shown to him never finds its transcendent place in Jackson's version of the plot.

Others besides this reviewer have already observed that the omission of "The Scouring of the Shire" does violence to Tolkien's conception. In the book, when the hobbits return to Hobbiton and to Bag End, they find so much destruction that Sam weeps and says, "This is worse than Mordor … it comes home to you." In the movie, however, the Shire to which the hobbits return is the same exaggerated Astroturf green as it was in the beginning Thus we are deprived of Tolkien's great insight that no one is innocent, that we must be ever-mindful of the way that evil seeks to bore its way into our own homes and our own hearts.

It can't be emphasized too strongly that Tolkien did not believe in a neat division of Good from Evil. He frequently put the word "good" into quotation marks in his letters, to make the point that evil can insinuate itself into the hearts of the "good" very readily. Our age needs desperately to hear what Frodo says when he spares Saruman's life: "He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I still would spare him, in the hope that he may find it" And what Saruman says to him: "You are wise and cruel, halfling … you have robbed my revenge of sweetness". Saruman's response to Frodo's mercy well illustrates Paul's teaching in Romans 12: "Beloved, never avenge yourselves … if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head."

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