Originally posted by Shehzad
Historically speaking, a heavy horse charge can break any army, even head-on, let alone hitting the rear of an unprepared army charging downhill! Made absolute sense.
Yeah, you're right! And then there's even the morale factor: when the charging riders clash the opposing army, the first ranks are slayn, those behind them see death before their eyes, fall prey to panic, start to retreat and fear quickly spreads through the whole army which gets helpless. History is full of similar situation, where a smaller but more motivated army put to rout a bigger but less motivated one.
And in Middle Earth the Rohirrim were renomed for their deadly charges, while orcs had no discipline: they crash and smash until anything goes well, but when things turn bad they lose all of their courage.
I loved the Rohirrim in the whole Lotr book, it saddened me a bit seeing how their stealthy ride to Pelennor was spoiled the way the movie does, giving the orcs time to draw up in order to face their charge. This way it was a lot spectacular, but it lost all of its adrenalin the book gives you.
Spectacular (needlessly too long) as well is the counterattack by the oliphaunts, but here the front charge by the Rohirrim semt a bit too dumb: they could just flank them and attack them from rear, the casualties would have been lesser, the oliphaunts were only eight or ten and weren't as agile in movement as a rider.
But I agree with what others stated before in this thread: this is not Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings", this is Jackson's "Lord of the Rings". And under this point of view, the whole movie gets more enjoyable.
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