like being inside a very violent video game

Rating: 1/10 (15 December 2013)

My wife and I saw it tonight with my teenage girls and a nice friend who paid for us all and I can honestly say that it was worse than a waste of his money - even our daughters who read the book said it was terrible - lots of things that were not in the book included, lots of (good) things that were in the book removed and super intense violence and death from beginning to end. I went for a walk outside part way through after the 50th head was chopped off in battle. As we watched it in 3-D Imax, to me, it was like being inside a very violent video game without all the quaint parts that Tolkien had in his book, removed.
If it is not as successful as they hope in sales then they might return to the actual story as written by Tolkien in Part 3, instead of reveling in 2 hours of humourless gore (no, Al was not in it, but it was bad nonetheless).
Tom