10 Subplots That Saved Entire Movies

The Lord Of The Rings movies are a miracle of adaptation. The exact right director, at the exact right moment in his career, with the exact right team, pulling off a Rube Goldberg machine of a trilogy that should have gone wrong at literally any moment but didn't.

And the reason it didn't is because Jackson knew what to keep, what to cut, and most importantly here, what to focus on.

Since Aragorn and pals' plot is the one where all the action is, and the film's structure wouldn't accommodate most of the books' road trip style "see a strange thing, talk to strange thing, move on" meanderings, something had to be done to make Frodo and Sam's plot more than just hiking through the mountains. So Jackson made Gollum's struggle with his humanity and his growing - and then fraying - bond with the two hobbits take center-stage.

Gollum was already a pretty complex character in the books, but Andy Serkis' performance, the still impressive motion capture used to bring Gollum to life, and the focus given to his tragic character arc, had Gollum stealing the show in every scene. And when you have the Battle Of Helm's Deep to compete with for awesome scenes, that's doubly impressive.