Most of the rest of this review appears to be sour grapes at artistic decisions to make TT fit into a different medium. People can quibble about Peter Jackson's decisions on the latter, but he had to make them.
He could have portrayed the Ent's decisions, and Treebeard, differently within the same time limit. Ditto for Faramir.
I hadn't caught the new writer. That might be the reason for so many wrong decisions in TT as opposed to FOTR.
And isn't it a shame? It didn't have to be that way. I've got a FReeper who's mad at me beacuse I've poked some fun at the film. Sam's speech at the end really got to him and my fun is tearing down the movie. Jackson and Co. have decided to trim out and re-invent all sorts of things that sincere fans of the book love and, well, we "purists" just have to accept that we're not going to get that.
I think it's pretty raw that after acceptinging cut out segments, doubled characters, line switches, and whole-cloth fabrications, we must now also accept smart characters being stupid and good characters being bad.