Under the auspices of a lesser director, watching the film could be like watching a freight train go by. This happens, then this happens, then this happens, then this happens — as our characters are tossed from action scene to action scene. Tolkien got away with this in the books because his writing was extraordinarily boring. You could never really tell you were being overstimulated.

I admit, I’ve never been especially impressed with Tolkien as a writer. The story itself is interesting, but there are long, boring stretches where characters are introduced and reintroduced to one another. Rarely have I come across a passage I could enjoy simply as a piece of writing, simply for the way the words were put together. Tonight, though, I did:

A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long had it been beautiful; and there great lords had dwelt, the wardens of Gondor upon the West, and wise men that watched the stars. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived — for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child’s model or a slave’s flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength.