A very enjoyable journey back to Middle Earth, even if somewhat smaller in scope.

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2012)

Peter Jackson's new journey into Middle Earth is an extremely entertaining and well constructed movie. It is not, of course, up to the impossible high standard that The Lord Of The Rings set for Jackson, but it is, on all accounts, a very good fantasy and adventure movie. The movie got critizised for it's deliberate leisured pace. Although I agree that some of the movie's scenes are not essencial and could very well be truncated without disrupting the narrative, the fact remains that these scenes, although not essencial to the plot, are not boring or uninteresting. The movie has considerable length but it never gets tiresome. Of course the novelty is somewhat gone to the point where at certain moments you can predict what course of action certain characters will take to advert tragedy .But despite that, the movie never gets boring and will certainly keep most viewers riveted throughout the movie due to it's well placed humor, beautiful imagery, visual effects, fleshed-out world and cameos of Middle Earth inhabitants that have been introduced to us in "The Lord Of The Rings". The movie, if approached on it's own terms and not subjected to comparison to it's counterpart, stands scrutiny with great ease. Or it should, but apparently the critics failed to evaluate it fairly, considering the average tomatometer rating. How this movie gets an average of 65 per cent and the childish, cartoonish, terribly scripted Sklyfall is over 90 per cent is beyond my grasp.