awe-inspiring, awwwwww-inspiring, AAAAH!-inspiring, and A HA HA!-inspiring...

Rating: 10/10 (20 December 2001)

It was impossible to not get too psyched up about it, so i didn't bother. I got really psyched up and saw the first (public) show in Maine yesterday at 11 A.M. I was not let down at all. It had really awe-inspiring moments, really "awwww"-inspiring moments, a couple "AAAAH!"-inspiring moments, and many "A HA HA HA!"-inspiring moments. The whole theater seemed to be as enthralled with the film as I was, but I know that's not possible. Noone could possibly like a movie as much as I liked this one, could they? I'm going to see it again and again.
OK, my girlfriend forbade me to say anything even remotely critical about this film, but she's not here now. The only criticisms I had were:
A.) I don't want to wait a year to see the next one
2.) The movie should have been 12 hours long so a lot more seemingly unimportant details could have been included. They had to sort of combine some scenes, and railroad other stuff to present it faster. Most notable: when Frodo puts on the ring, it's not very subtle, in the book it seems to start of with a vague sense of being watched - and when the Fellowship breaks up near the end they sort of combined some scenes. Oh well, had to be done.
III) There were approximately 2 moments where I didn't think the CGI was not perfectly seamless -lets see, that's about 100 fewer times than the next best heavily CGIed movie I've seen... Those were both in Moria.
I was going to say that if they were going to gloss over little details, they could have minimized the Aragorn/Elf (her name escapes me) romance -but in retrospect it was pretty much minimized, and the scene was aesthetically beautiful so scratch that one. That's just my preference anyway...