The Lord of the Rings movies have three major pitched battles: Helms Deep, Pelennor Fields, and the Fields of Cormallen. Unfortunately, for all that Helms Deep is a (flawed) masterpiece, its successors are, in my opinion at least, not nearly as good as they should be. Pelennor in particularly starts out very well, with all the potential of Helm Deep and more, but somehow at the end it feels lesser, not nearly as eventful as Helms Deep, even though it actually involves more armies, more weapons, more impressive foes, and more of the characters we care about (it adds Faramir and two of the hobbits, while Eowyn and Gandalf get larger roles). Still, something doesn’t work.

Before we look to diagnose what went wrong, we should start by analyzing what went right. Pelennor Fields starts strong. The battle starts, like Helms Deep, with the arrival of a vast army outside the walls of a fortress, equipped with even more impressive siege equipment. Daylight declares its mass as it stretches across an open field. Soon, heads begin to rain from the sky, towers crumble (much faster than stone ought to, in my opinion), and the great siege towers move forward. The music backs this all up wonderfully, and the battle is begun.

The battle’s tide shifts back to Gondor now as the trebuchets fire their chunks of rubble,¹ squishing orcs flat. Then, as a trebuchet shot lands, the action holds its breath. The orc captain spit upon the rock, and now the music’s relentless beat returns. Upon that rush ride in the Nazgul, mounted on Fell Beasts, raking the walls, and their terror strikes the defenders. The moment of hope is ended. The tension of the battle, the terror of it, escalates again, and then the orcs are on the walls. Grond arrives, and after night falls, the gate is breached. The defenders retreat up into the city, and the army of Mordor pursues.

The through-line we must attend to here is the ratcheting-up of tension. Each step of the battle unfolds with another notch of danger. An army, an army with artillery, an army in the air, an army on the walls, an army past the gate. Those moments of reversal, where the defenders have victory, are short-lived; they are manifestly delaying the inevitable, not turning the tide, and the day seems ever more hopeless. We know, of course, that the Rohirrim ride to Gondor’s aid, but will they arrive in time? Will it be enough? The questions grow ever more terrifying as time goes on, and Denethor’s despair confirms our fears.

Then the Rohirrim arrive, and their appearance achieves its majesty only by virtue of the darkness it arrives upon. Dawn has broken now, and we have hope again: the Rohirrim are here to right the day, to bring true victory, not merely delay. They form up on the hill, the sun rises to light their charge, and the orcs are caught off-guard. Yet even here the danger of the moment is not suffered to die, for Theoden (stealing Eomer’s line from the book) raises his battle cry: “Death!” Under such a grim word they charge, and we realize that we may hardly hope for victory here. A good death alone is to be found.

The battle, however, goes all one way for the next little bit. The orcs resist, and the Rohirrim are given no easy task, but they crash through the orc rabble.² Sauron’s forces are overrun; victory appears on the horizon. Then Theoden looks, and the battle pauses to let us understand the new turn of events: the Easterlings are here. The battle turns, and though defeat no longer seems inevitable, victory is still far off. Then, just as the easterlings look to be matched, though hardly bested, the Witch King descends upon Theoden. The dark hour has arrived again, and we fear that the day is finally lost, without hope of retrieval.

Thus far for the good, but the film’s departure from the books has already hurt it. In the books, the battle begins under the unnatural night which the Witch King brought upon the land while the Rohirrim were still far off. In this night, Minas Tirith is assailed. The Rohirrim arrive not as dawn appears, for dawn cannot reach past Sauron’s smog, but instead only a little after the gate of Minas Tirith is shattered by Grond, named after Morgoth’s hammer. They ride in under darkness, and yet there is hope. Small hope, but hope nonetheless. Then, as they war, the sheer terror of the Witch King³ sends Theoden’s horse into a frenzy, and the king is trapped underneath. Eowyn and Merry, like in the film, kill the Witch King, who uses a mace (not the ridiculous weapon-like-object he has in the film), and the dark recedes. Eowyn is catatonic, though, and Merry hardy better, so when Eomer arrives to see his uncle dead, he sees too his sister, whom he thought safe. Eowyn, Eomer thinks, is dead, and his near-father with her. “Death,” he cries, and now the battle rejoins. Black Ships appear on the river to the south, and now all hope it lost, even as the men of the city, lead by Dol Amroth, sally forth to meet the Rohirrim.

The essential element we must understand here is the way the story handles tension. To borrow from Tolkien’s other terminology, the Battle of Pelennor Fields is, up until the final moments, a ‘Long Defeat.’ The defenders of the city and their allies fight tooth, nail, claw, bone, bristle, and stump, but the battle is ever against them. They may make a step forward, but the world’s tide draws them back down. When the Witch King dies, it is hope and the dawning of light, but Eomer’s cry and the sheer scale of the army arrayed against them and the coming of the Black Ships all speak the same message. They fight, it seems, against the inevitable, so that even their greatest moment becomes, by its uselessness, a discouragement. This is an essential element of a conflict, if it is to have tension.

I said that the film’s departure from the books hurt it, but how? Simply put, by placing the death of the Witch King after Aragorn’s arrival (we’ll get to this in a moment), the film loses the impact of the Witch King’s death, the moment of hope, the realization of hopelessness; it loses too the grim beauty of Eomer’s despair as he charges to a now-desired death, a death he sees as truly inevitable. Further, by removing Sauron’s shading of the sun, the film loses a powerful tool to impress the gravity of the circumstance upon its audience.⁴

With all this, though, we’ve yet to get to the biggest loss of all: how the film ends the battle. The Battle of Pelennor Fields, in the books, ends with a three-way assault by the Rohirrim, the men of Gondor led by Imrahil, and the reinforcements out of south Gondor led by Aragorn- the army that comes out of the Black Ships. They fight hard and long, and the book explicitly indicates that skirmishes continued long after the morale of the Easterlings and their ilk broke at Aragorn’s arrival and advance. In the Film, meanwhile, Aragorn hops out of the boat… and several thousand green ghosts pop out behind him, floating over the orkish army at high speed and instantaneously flattening them.

The reason that the film ending deflates the impact of the battle is simple: it looks easy. The battle’s gravity was conveyed to us by the difficult the characters had in fighting it, by the suffering they endured, by the effort they made and how futile it seemed. The ghosts, then, come onto the battlefield, and suddenly it’s over, as easy as licking a spoon. It isn’t just that it’s quick. The problem here is this: from the instant the ghosts hit the orkish line, the ending is certain, but then we hover uncertainly for a minute or two on a scene without true tension, reshaping what came before with an instinctive bias to see it as easy, given how easy the solution was. Hard problems, after all, don’t have quick and easy solutions (not to our instinct, at least). Because that scene is still part of that battle, the lack of tension becomes a part of the battle, and the tension that came before is devalued. The entire battle suffers massively because all of its suffering ends with an easy victory.

Eowyn’s victory against the Witch King too suffers, if not so much in itself. Inside her story and the mini-narrative that is that particular fight, the effect of the ghost’s is minimal. However, by re-ordering the battle and lining up the Witch King’s death to be after the arrival of the ghosts, though it may seem like it serves a good purpose in arranging the climaxes of the plot-threads local to the battle into one hard-hitting bundle, Jackson has removed the significance of the Witch King’s death to the battle around it, made it merely another part of the ghost’s easy victory. No longer is the Witch King’s death a moment of hope to be quickly extinguished; no longer is Eowyn’s catatonia afterwards the catalyst of Eomer’s grand despair; no longer does her deed clear the sky itself of darkness. Now, it is the death of the Witch King alone, and as great as that is, it is still lesser than it should have been.⁶

A last note before I depart: the problem of the ghost army has a lesser imitator. Legolas’s takedown of the mumakil (the oliphaunt) is a detriment to the scene for the same reason- making things too easy- if to a much lesser extent. While Eomer and Eowyn taking down their mumakil earlier feels like a part of the battle, reliant on gambits and (dubiously realistic) skill that merely help even the playing field, Legolas single-handedly slaughters everybody on the mumakil in a way that seems a little cartoon-physics (incidentally equaling a fair portion of his Helms Deep kill-count), and in the context of the ghost army, it comes off as cheap. Yes, Legolas should be an impressive warrior, but the way in which he wins this victory is so showy it gives the idea of being a trifle, making him more ‘cool’ than ‘impressive.’

The lesson of Pelennor Fields, in short, is that if you want the reader to believe something was hard to do, show it being hard. If you want them to be impressed, show them how the characters struggle. Show them a victory won with blood, sweat, toil, and tears. Remember that an easy victory, even at the end of a hard battle, will rob the whole event of impact, like a mace with a pillow around its head. This lesson applies, too, to every part of story where we want tension and effect; even more generally, we can apply it in the realization that, in stories, the ending of an element has a massive effect on how it is remembered, can make the romantic creepy or the bewildering clever.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Which looks good but does not, in my opinion, particularly make sense. The film iteration of this battle has issues from a practical standpoint.

2 – Going by the books and Sauron’s character therein, the orcs should likely be uniformly equipped and arrayed in at least a decent formation. If they were, a cavalry charge becomes much less dangerous, though still effective.

3 – The movie’s version of the Nazgul’s terror is frankly small potatoes. In the books, men were essentially paralyzed by fear, not merely driven under cover. In the book, the fact that Eowyn can speak coherently in the Witch King’s presence is clear proof of exceptional mettle.

4 – For me, at least, the somewhat lackluster choreography of certain fights, the lore-breaking conversation between Gandalf and Pippin,⁵ the fact that Minas Tirith seemingly didn’t evacuate the lower circles in the run-up to the battle, and the odd fragility of the stonework (especially in light of the book-lore, which places the walls on a level with the tower of Orthanc for durability) also hurt the story.

5 – Gandalf describes what is clearly Valinor to Pippin as if it were a general-purpose afterlife. Valinor, in the book-lore, is actually still within Arda (though not Middle Earth); while elves, bound to Arda (the universe) for the length of its existence, will end up in Valinor or its environs after death, mortals such as men and dwarves (and hobbits, as they are seemingly a sort of man) go beyond Arda’s compass, not to Valinor, when they die.

6 – Particularly since, again, the Nazgul’s Breath and fear are much less impressive in the movies.