IT'S MADNESS! MAAAADNESSSSS!!!!

Rating: 5/10 (22 December 2001)

I feel like I am in an episode of the twilight zone, where everyone is oblivious to the obvious except for me. No matter what I say, I can't convince anyone of the truth, the horrible horrible truth.... Dear god, what happened to you all?
Last night I spent three hours sitting in a theatre which, by the way, was mostly empty, watching the most overhyped movie since The Phantom Menace. Lord of The Rings was mediocre at best. It served it's genre well with lots of swords and sorcery, but as far as it's overall quality, it was SEVERELY lacking. The story runs like an '87 Honda Prelude. It takes an hour to get up to 55mph. The first hour and a half is spent setting up what turns out to be a NON-ENDING. We are forced to follow young Frodo and his pack of badly developed and badly directed companions along a seemingly endless journey to... Well, I'll let YOU see for yourself. The trip is punctuated by short bursts of action that seem to do little more than whet your appetite for SOMETHING - ANYTHING to happen. I got to see SHREK shot in the head with an arrow in one underground battle. Who was in charge of THAT CGI sequence?
The tools and materials for a top notch film are all here. Great actors, fantastic sets and beautifully desinged costumes along with a solid story. Something went terribly wrong in the storyboarding stage, however. The film has no structure. There is no first, second and third act. Instead there are a couple of short fight scenes and an unresolved ending. None of the combat sequences is any more or less grand in scale, so the film never reaches any kind of climax. I found myself waitng, waiting and waiting some more for a signal that the film was at it's halfway point, a signal that never came. There was a collective groan of both disgust and ticked-offedness when the ending FINALLY rolled around. I would equate the feeling to waiting in line at Universal Studios for three hours to go on a thrill ride that EVERYONE has been RAVING about. You get on the ride and wind up watching anamatrons sing "It's a small world after all." You want your money back. A properly executed trilogy is exemplified in STAR WARS. Here you have three separate films revolving around a central story. Each film has a climax and a resolution and can stand on it's own. It seems that for any kind of satisfaction with the LOTR trilogy, we are going to have top sit through all nine hours of the completed set. I don't know what is wrong with everyone, you all must be mad because this film is NOT worth a 9.6 rating. It's worth a 7 at BEST. It seems that all of you Tolkein fans out there just blindly accept whatever comes your way. The industry really gave you all a hype enema and I guess the general feeling out there in 'fantasy world' was "Thank you sir! May I have another?" Wake up, pull your heads out of the 'dungeon' and move out of the basement. The reality is, Hollywood stole your money on this one. I have to go now, it's time to check up on Jar Jar Binks to see how he is going to ruin ANOTHER STAR WARS film. Keep it real.