Lord Of The Rings: The most overrated movie since the beginning of time. (Lazy Review  Some Spoilers)

Rating: 1/10 (24 August 2002)

Let's get one thing straight: I'm going to be... controversial... daring... notorious... I'm not going to say that this movie was "good". Shock. Horror.
I was looking over the top 250 movies on imdb, and there was Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring sitting in fourth place. FOURTH place? How can this movie be the fourth greatest movie to EVER be created? How? Especially when you find masterpieces such as Schindler's List, American Beauty and Das Boot propping up the pile. It's not a surprise; there's no doubt in my mind that the next two films will also grace the top ten: all three of them, gleaming in a line. But why? Am I the only person in the entire world who DOESN'T think this is "one of the greatest films of all time", "best ever", "sensational"?
It's amazing  but when I was asked, "What did you think of Lord of the Rings?" and I had the plain audacity to reply with "It's alright, I s'pose  average", I was greeted with an array of shocked faces. It's like the film no one can criticise. And if you do, you're clearly insane, and deserve to be locked up.
As for what I made of the film itself, it started off well  characters developing nicely, interesting storyline. It was once Frodo set off with the ring that things went downhill. This probably originates from the book, but why was everything hidden in the mountains of doom, in the land of evil behind the trees of terror? Did everything really have to be that over-the-top? Even down to the whole: black = bad, white >good?
I've not read the book (I also never, ever intend to)  I'm ignorant, clueless, no chance of ever getting it', BUT... when I came out of the cinema, I couldn't even tell you the names of half the characters, let alone anything about their personalities. You form a fellowship, and you'd expect one or two alliances/disagreements to occur. Barely anything. In fact, I was surprised any of them even cared when Gandalf fell over the edge. There was just no depth. It was all action, action, action  and no relationships or much development of characters. Even in The Terminator, you at least knew one or two things about the main characters. What makes a great masterpiece of a film is having action, drama, strong characters, etc. As far as I can tell, the only plus side of this film is the special effects.

A few other points to add...
Firstly, half-way through the film, when they arrived at the Elvin village, it almost felt like the film was over. There was all the closure of, "we're safe now..." and not even any cross-cutting back to the black riders. When the fellowship finally set off (a good hour and a half into the film!) it felt like another film was starting.
Gollum  the most un-scary thing. Ever. Oh, and the scene where the fellowship were hiding, and one of the hobbits knocked something over  was that meant to be quite so funny?
Aragorn and Boromir look near-identical. This is most confusing.
3 hours is just too long. Unless the film is worth it. And this one isn't. I dread to think what sitting through the director's cut must be like...

If anyone out there agrees with me, track down the spoof version of this by French and Saunders. That is sheer brilliance.
Anyway, I'm off to live in a cave until 2010, when the Lord of the Rings hype should've died down sufficiently. Unless it's anything like Star Wars. In which case, I'll see you 30 years.
I can't help but wonder, I wonder if this film would've been successful if not for the huge amount of propaganda and anticipation, which just wasn't deserved?
But then again, if this film hadn't been so successful, would I have been so critical?
It was probably worth a 7 out of 10. However, it painted itself as an off-the-scale 10. So I'll give it a 1 instead. Ha.