Loved it

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2001)

I fall into the category of people who have read and loved the books for many years, and to whom it's a dream come true that someone has finally made a worthy film adaptation. Not the greatest movie of all time, but I can't think of a movie this year that I'd rather see than watching this one again.
(Spoiler alert - some of what follows could conceivably give something away...) As far as the omissions from the book, I never cared that much for the Tom Bombadil chapters anyway, and I have no problem with the decision to cut Glorfindel, Radagast, the Sackville-Bagginses, etc for purposes of brevity. But I do worry that some omissions will make things less clear for non-readers. For example, the council of Elrond jumped hastily to destruction of the Ring, skipping the consideration of "losing" it again (say, tossing it into the ocean) - and viewers new to the story might not appreciate the crucial element of surprise that makes the quest feasible: Sauron will be expecting someone to use the Ring, or take it west, and not be looking on his own doorstep. After seeing the broken sword (the shards of Narsil), I don't recall being told that it's been reforged and Aragorn is now using it. Shouldn't Sam have gotten his gift from Galadriel? (maybe this lets us know what's going to be trimmed from the 3rd book). And I think it would have been better to show Gollum following them more than the one time - maybe add a 1-2 minute scene of the "log" floating down the Anduin. None of these things really took away from my experience, but I worry about the mainstream audience.
A lot of the negative reviews here take issue with the lack of a satisfactory ending, but of course that's unavoidable: the story is what it is. But after the way they interwove the Gandalf/Saruman story with the flight from the Shire, I'm wondering how they're going to handle the story threads in the Two Towers. If Frodo and Sam's tale is told simultaneously with the others, rather than the way Tolkien wrote it, following it all may be a challenge. We'll see.
But it's a huge blessing to know that they've shot all three movies, so the entire story will be told, with the same cast and presumably a consistent level of quality. And judging from the 9.5/1st place IMDB rating so far (rather than by the disproportionate number of poor reviews) there will continue to be a massive audience for the LOTR movies, and new generations will discover this magnificent story.