people who really "get" Tolkien will not admire this film

Rating: 1/10 (11 August 2002)

***spoilers***

1st- whoever wrote and agreed to the musical score should be railroaded out of town. there is less sap in a pine tree. was this movie "Titanic"? It would have been better if Max Steiner was scoring, and some of you know my irony. God! I thought I saw Kate Winslet playing Sam and kissing Frodo in a boat headed toward Mordor!
This music sucked out any solid substance which this film might have built on, and substituted thick sugary emptiness.
2nd- Directors should stop forcing actors to be part of the set. When Liam Neeson said he would never act in a Hollywood movie again, he blamed Georgle Lucas for treating him like a prop. TFOTR is a disaster on par with Phantom Menace. Almost every scene in this movie is storyboarded like a cheap comicbook, without any of the redeeming values that can be found in good animation or adventure. Try Akira or Princess Mononoka (sp?) to guess what magic is supposed to be in fantasy. If you are a true fan of fantasy you appreciate characters that you learn to love, characters you connect with. These hobbits have less of a fellowship than NYC neighbors. Who are Sam, Pippen, etc? If you never read the book this movie doesn't tell you, and in the movie they are just dead space. Nor do you learn about or admire Aragorn, Legolas, (the elves are ALL wrong, except maybe Galadriel in her tiny scene), the dwarf, or even Frodo. Gandalf and Bilbo make a good early impression on the audience, and shine through at moments, but the other members of the party are nothing but one-dimensional bodies. Where is the ethereal, near Godhood of the Elves? Where the grudging likeability of the Dwarves, the nobility and dignity of the Humans? Aragorn looks and acts like a 80's hairband rockstar, and the boy-Elf is from N'Synch. Even the normally reliable Bean as Borimor is lost in the onslaught of Hollywood's pandering, restrictive manipulation. I bet if you like TFOTR you loved "Sixth Sense," it used the same "methods" of movie construction employed here. I could rant on and on about the cheesy closeups, or the "oh so pitiful" and confused looks on the suffering, put-upon faces everytime something happened..."now we're scared, now we're shocked, now we're running and swinging swords"....PUKE! Not one glimpse of real characters on a real mission to save all life from evil. Have you ever seem "Wages of Fear" from the '53? Even without characterization you need convincing action like in "Blackhawk Down" to make you feel a battleship bond.

3. I have to give credit to the design effects here. The opening scenes in Mordor and the Shire are very good, and the castles and volcanoes are frightening. There is little of the obvious computerness of the "Mummy", in comparison. I thought Sauron, the digital sets, the "dragon" firework, the wizard battle, and few other scenes were intense and on the mark. The wraiths were predictable wimps who stood around in a clump pointing swords at people, and most battle scenes were hatchet edit jobs like the haphazard junk we've seen in "Gladiator", but worse. The gestation of the Uruk-Hai was suitably horrific, but aftwards he was a mockery of himself as his scary face came huffing and puffing along..."look out! it's the 'Predator' coming!!! Run!"...How silly...but the love scene between Borimor and Aragorn afterwards is sillier. Basically there is no drama about war, adventure, or heroism here, just B-movie "radioactive-man" bad guys, (except Saruman) and "singing cowboy" good guys.
after 3 hours of more and more insults, then 40 minutes writing this, I'm tired. I could hammer this flick for days....but just let me say I really wanted to like this film, but it's not good. The system of making movies today is fundamentally flawed, which represents a sickness in our culture. If you can't or won't recognize that fact, you are part of the problem. I don't claim to know much about the world, or life, but I know this much; The spirit of Tolkien, which is the spirit of the universe, is not in this film, nor will it be in the others. No technically brilliant, 30 second clip, (even if it momentarily makes you exist in Middle Earth), can truly help you into another world in order to for you to understand more about your own. Tolkien was a great mythologist, humanist, and philosopher, and the wonder of living was in his words. That magic is not present here.(mostly) I'm sorry.