10. The Songs
To be fair to Jackson, we have to somewhat admire his restraint in not including
all the songs from Tolkein's novel, as in addition to the mere two songs that feature in the film, Tolkein wrote another for when the Elves welcome Gandalf, Bilbo and the Dwarves to Rivendell, and also two for the goblins. This is a rare instance of Jackson actually judging the tone correctly and realising that they would likely not fit into a cinematic translation all that well, and they'd also just pad the screen-time out even further. Still, Jackson elects to include two of the Dwarven songs in the film, but at least they both occur early on, I suppose, even if they do essentially waste about five minutes that could have been spent on, you know, moving the story forward or something. The songs have always been an odd idiosyncrasy of the novels, with Tolkein clearly appearing to assume that because this book in particular is written with children in mind, that there needs to be a song every few pages or they'll get bored. I had hoped in vain that Jackson would not include them at all, because they're head-smackingly cringe-inducing.