My greatest disappointment so far has been the size of Bilbo's house. While it's quite nice and comfy, I got the impression from reading the book that it should be at least twice as long as Jackson shows it. I always felt that Bag End was on a pretty good-sized hill, and Bilbo's place took up a big chunk of it.
For that matter, the Party Field seemed a lot smaller than I thought it would be. And from the stills and trailers, Meduseld seems smaller than I imagined.
Of course, Moria was sufficiently grand in scale. And Jackson improved on Tolkien with the orcs, making them more nasty and disgusting than I perceived them from the books. It makes orc-killing a major beautification project.
One last post, and then I've got to leave until later. But the article I've been talking about addresses this as well. I don't necessarily agree with it, but let me put it out for conversational purposes:
"Equally misunderstood and misrepresented are those who have succumbed to the forces of evil. An excellent example is in the depiction of the Orcs, a race that was bred to be the minions of evil. They are the scions of snared Elves and Men, twisted and broken over the centuries. In Tolkien's depiction, these hordes are just that - hordes. They are surprisingly faceless in battle. One gets the impression that, if the average swordsman came upon a solitary Orc, he would be revolted and saddened, but not particularly threatened. In numbers, however, they are the overwhelming masses of bureaucratic evil: the nameless, faceless denizens of the dark, tied to their Lord by mutual hatred and fear, rather than by loyalty and love. Even the "fighting Uruk-hai," the larger, stronger Orcs bred by the turncoat wizard Saruman to fight in the sunlight, are not individual "personalities" so much as a powerful cohort.
"Yet Jackson, though he expends valuable screen time on the exposition of their lineage, misses this crucial point when he dedicates huge amounts of time to brief shots of snarling individual Orcs. In so doing he nullifies the true horror of the Orcs; this faceless horde is what broken and twisted people can become. Instead, his Orcs are persons to be reckoned with. Their lack of virtue has made them personalities, individually important. The only place where they are really frightening as a horde is the Dwarf-mines of Moria, and there they are transformed into an insectile swarm that descends the columns of the hall to surround the Fellowship. They have lost all connection with us. They are not twisted versions of recognizable people. They are totally other. Jackson's cartoonish Orcs are evil because they are foreign, not foreign because they are evil."
Thoughts?