Good, but not THAT good

Rating: 5/10 (30 December 2002)

I used to think "Dances With Wolves" was the most overrated movie of all time. It wasn't bad, per se, but it was certainly not deserving of its Best Picture Oscar (Should've been GoodFellas). The three hour+ movie can be summed up thusly: white man bad, red man good. OH, and the cinematography was gorgeous. And perhaps it is the cinematography that suckered so many into believing LOTR was so amazing. It works as a very effective commercial for New Zealand tourism. However, as a film, it breaks no new ground. Elijah Wood spends three hours looking like a deer caught in high beams. It gets annoying about 45 minutes in. Merry and Pippin, the two pointless sidekick hobbits, are the equivalent of Disney's stereotypical comic relief fuzzy sidekicks (see: Timon and Pumbaa (Lion King), Sebastian and Flounder (Little Mermaid), etc.) The battle scenes are fairly typical for the genre: overwhelming odds, poor shooting bad guys, perfectly accurate good guys, false alarm main character "death", dramatic actual death scene of semi-major character. I do realize it is simply part one of three, so I won't criticize the non-ending. However, I do not expect much more from the second installment.