Nice scenery

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2001)

The one thing that everyone learns from this movie is that New Zealand is apparently a beautiful place. No wonder the NZ tourist board is so pleased with the end result. I came out wanting to book a flight there, and I suspect I wasn't the only one.
What I did not come out of the theater with was any sense of having enjoyed myself. For almost three hours I sat through it and at the end all I could think was: What was that all about? I have never read the books, so I had no idea at all what the story was. Maybe in order to drool over this movie you have to have read the books first. That way you can understand it.
At the very start we got a couple of minutes of voice-over narration, telling us in hurried tones that there were these rings, see, and so-and-so got one, and then another lot went to a bunch of people with white beards, and some other rings were given out to other people whose names you don't catch. No one bothers to tell you why, if these rings are so troublesome, anyone went to the bother of making them in the first place. Anyway, some monsters fought each other (why?) and one ring ended up in a river or a field or something, and Ian Holm found it and that was when things rally got bad.
A jolly little scene with Ian McKellern and Ian Holm ensues but then Holm decides he has to leave his home (why?) and we find ourselves cast into what the rest of the movie consists of -- a bunch of people trekking from A to B to C and having to fight various monsters and mutants in a series of almost identical battles. In most of these they are heavily outnumbered but they always win. It may have been allegorical, it may have been full of significance, but by God it was dull! Sean Bean shows up after a while, but his character is as sombre as the rest. Cate Blanchett appears near the end, but she has very little screen time and what she says makes little sense anyway.
And just when you think it has to be over soon, that they couldn't possibly string it out any further, it ends with nothing accomplished, nothing decided, and in order to see how it ends you have to sit through two more episodes, which will probably be just more of the same: walking, fighting, beautiful scenery, joyless acting.
People who have read the books will love this film, because of course they will relive the pleasure they got from the books as the movie unfolds. That will not be much of a reflection of the movie itself. For those who have not read the books it will be an overlong fantasy tale, best viewed in a few years when it comes out on TV.