Set pieces...battles...set pieces...battles...

Rating: Null/10 (21 September 2002)

THE LORD OF THE RINGS has its admirers who are familiar with the plot and the strange characters inhabiting it--and who genuinely love the book and were eager to see their favorite story on the big screen.
In this case, it helps if you are familiar with the plot and the characters because the screenplay is a murky one with none of the characters given enough time for us to understand what they are all about. Instead, we move from set piece to set piece (grand, beautiful sets abetted by dazzling visual effects) and in between each new grand view locale there's another battle of good vs. evil with weapons clashing in every direction and limbs lopped off as fierce battles ensue.
It's a sort of dungeons and dragons world and if this is your thing then this is your dark movie adventure. I saw this on video rather than the big screen so I can assure you it probably all looks a lot grander on the theater screen with the deafening stereo sound effects adding to the vigor of the story. But none of the characters really stand out amid all this swordplay and skullduggery.
Only Ian McKellen and Elijah Wood have substantial enough parts to connect a viewer to the movie. The others are all backgrounders without becoming characters we care about--with the exception, perhaps, of Christopher Lee as Saruman the White, who always makes a convincing villain. Another problem is the sound--voices are dropped so often that much of the stilted dialogue is muted. This is a special drawback because several of the actors have some sort of accent. The worst offender happens to be Ian McKellen who nevertheless gives a very compelling performance behind his grizzly make-up--however, someone should have dubbed some of his lines for greater clarity. The likeable Elijah Wood relies on his specialty--wide-eyed wonder or tense concern for close-ups, but it's rather a one-note performance.
All in all, I was disappointed. With all of the hype (and due to some of the comments expressed here) I expected a much more substantial story than this, especially for a movie with a running time of almost three hours. The drawback on video is that many of the special effects are pretty obvious and the big screen grandeur is lost even when viewed on a large TV screen.

A bit of a letdown in every department. Even the score only occasionally has the right mystical quality between battles. The battles are not quite as brutal as those in GLADIATOR but their intensity is just as great and they turn up with alarming frequency!