Stunning.

Rating: 10/10 (28 December 2001)

It's been said before, and I'm going to say it again: This is an excellent film. True, it's not completely faithful to the books, and it misses out some quite important pieces of the book (especially some of the character's backgrounds)in favour of more dramatic action sequences.
The only other problems I had with it was that some of the CGI was a little too obviously CGI (a problem shared by Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone), and the battles were a little bit hard to follow (but then again it's just as easy to argue that the camerawork reflects the confusion of a good old fashioned melee), but in a film that kept me entertained for 3 hours, these are insignificant problems :).
Hopefully people not familiar with Lord of the Rings will see the film and be sufficiently impressed by it to read the books, and see the amazing world Tolkien created.