Return of the King countdown: five days

Gandalf passed now into the wide land beyond the Rammas Echor. So the men of Gondor called the out-wall that they had built with great labour, after Ithilien fell under the shadow of their Enemy. For ten leagues or more it ran from the mountains' feet and so back again, enclosing in its fence the fields of the Pelennor: fair and fertile townlands on the long slopes and terraces falling to the deep levels of the Anduin. At its furthest point from the Great Gate of the City, north-eastward, the wall was four leagues distant, and there from a frowning bank it overlooked the long flats beside the river, and men had made it high and strong; for at that point, upon a walled causeway, the road came in from the fords and bridges of Osgiliath and passed through a guarded gate between embattled towers. At its nearest point the wall was little more than one league from the City, and that was south-eastward. There Anduin, going in a wide knee about the hills of Emyn Arnen in South Ithilien, bent sharply west, and the out-wall rose upon its very brink; and beneath it lay the quays and landings of the Harlond for craft that came upstream from the southern fiefs.

—The Lord of the Rings, Book V, “Minas Tirith”

Tolkien's description of the capital city of Gondor—from which the above is taken—is both detailed and evocative. Which, of course, has not prevented some artists from getting it horribly wrong (this one is just disturbing, though for different reasons).

But every indication is that the movie will get the City itself exactly right. I'm withholding judgement on the main gate until getting a better look, but from the spoiler photos and movie trailers, everything else—the walls and battlements, the throne room in the Tower of Ecthelion, the fountain and the White Tree, even the massive jutting prow of rock—is spot on. Very cool indeed.

Yet something is awry with the City's environs: in short, there's no Pelennor. Sure, there's something that Peter Jackson and Co. are calling the Pelennor Fields, but it appears to be only a flat and mostly desolate expanse. In place of Tolkien's pastoral townlands, protected behind the expanse of the Rammas Echor (pelennor, after all, is Sindarin for “fenced land”), there is a semi-arid plain—and this leading down to the banks of the greatest river in Middle-earth, the Anduin.

This is wrong on so many levels. Not just because I'm a purist (which I am, mostly) but because it makes no narrative sense. Minas Tirith was the capital of the most advanced civilization of Men in Middle-earth; remember, the Dúnedain of Gondor traced their lineage back to the Númenóreans. The City during the War of the Ring was some three millenia old, yet in Jackson's depiction, outside the walls…nothing at all: no homesteads, no farmlands, only the road to the ruins of Osgiliath.

Gondor at this time was not the power that it had once been. Nonetheless, consider some primary-world analogues to Minas Tirith: Rome, past the height of its imperial glory, or (better yet) nineth- or tenth-century Constantinople. These cities certainly did not lack basic infrastructure. Nor did Tolkien's Tower of Guard, and Jackson's choice on this point lessens the sense of realism he has labored so hard to achieve.

UPDATE: I decided not to link to movie images of Minas Tirith. But to cleanse your mind of the frightening artistic interpretations linked above, here's two much better examples, by Ted Nasmith: 1 2.