[Teresa Edgerton]

I liked Sean Bean's Boromir -- who didn't remind me of a barbarian warrior at all. I saw a civilized man who was weary of fighting and desperate to save his people from what appeared to be certain destruction.

Boromir in the book seems to be driven more by pride, by the desire to be the hero. In the movie, it seemed to me that Boromir just wanted it all to be over. But after Boromir's death, Tolkien tells you things that humanize him, that make him seem more admirable and more accessible. Too late, because the impression of a chilly, prideful man is difficult to banish. Which Boromir is closer to the man Tolkien intended his readers to see? We could debate that for a long time, and I'll bet we would never agree.

It seems to me that Sean Bean (under Peter Jackson's direction) played the Boromir of those belated glimpses, the one whose kind but lordly manner won Pippin's devotion, the one beloved and deeply mourned by a father and a brother, the one whose death pierced Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn to the heart. It was a sympathetic portrayal, and it won my sympathy for a character I had never been able to warm to in the books. When Boromir died in the book, I was unmoved. All that eulogizing and I felt nothing. In the movie, I felt every one of those crossbow bolts go in, and it didn't take a lot of poetry on the part of the other characters to tell me the man would be missed.

I have a lot of quibbles about differences between the books and the movie, but Boromir was the one character where I thought the changes were the most justified.


But to return to Gandalf: I agree with those who say that it wasn't his job to take on the Witch King. One thing I didn't like in the movie was the way Jackson made it seem like the Witch King was somehow supposed to be Gandalf's counterpart and particular nemesis. That was just wrong.