Heh there's a guild in LOTRO called "Law and Mordor" that I thought was cute
I just rewatched The Two Towers (extended edition) last nite and got all misty-eyed at the same parts. And it's also seriously funny spotting Jackson and his little children in the movie (who are listed in the credits are "Cute Rohan Refugee Children"). I like the storyline cross-cutting because the movie this way actually builds to a climax, instead of having a spider-climax (sent to RotK in the movies), an Ent climax, and a Battle climax. You kind of keep tabs on everyone instead of it building to a climax in the first hour, then saying "two days/weeks/months earlier" and then building to another one, and then AGAIN saying "two months earlier" and then doing it again.
No, the way PJ did it chronologically was superior in a film to how it was done in the novel, where you have hundreds of pages in between these things. What was "lost" suspense-wise in not doing it the novel's way was minimal (and I still think is limited to the Mouth of Sauron sequence, which was cut from the original).
And PJ did make up entire scenes and dialogue from scratch. Hell, he did in FotR, and that was the one that was the MOST faithful to the underlying work. I'm just not into the "anywhere it ain't Tolkien it is teh suck" mentality. The essence of the story is there. Some characters (Aragorn, Faramir) grow as characters MORE than they do in the book. It makes for good watching on its own merits. There's a big big difference between an adaptation like LotR, keeping the point of the novel intact, and something craptastic like "I Am Legend", which took a brilliant premise/underlying work, kept the main character's name and a small part of the premise, and made a work with an entirely meaningless/different point.