Nothing more than an action movie... terrible.

Rating: 1/10 (14 January 2002)

I can only hope that Tolkien isn't turning over in his grave after watching this movie from wherever he might be. I should begin with the disclaimer that I didn't dislike this movie because of its deviations from the book. Peter Jackson has performed a small miracle condensing a 400+ page book into three hours, so alterations to the plot were acceptable. That being said, Fellowship of the Ring was a terrible ACTION movie. In an of itself it was entertaining enough, in the same way that Armageddon or Independence Day are entertaining movies. But the fact that this movie graces the top 100 movies (IMDB) of all time is ridiculous, if not laughable. To put this movie, an ACTION movie, in the same category as Schindler's List, The Godfather, or The Shawshank Redemption is an absolute tragedy and mockery of objective film criticism. My main criticism is simply that this movie in no way analyzed the complex characters and character relationships so vividly depicted in Tolkien's books. In fact, hardly any characters were developed at all. And not only were the characters not explored, but in their stead was substituted pathetic things like an attempt to incorporate a Hollywood-ized love scene between Aragorn and Arwen that didn't exist in the first book, and was not even acknowledged until the third book (and in hardly the detail).
The plain fact is that this movie was an ACTION movie, and by no means does it deserve an IMDB rating above a 7. Don't get me wrong, it was a good ACTION movie, but by no means excellent. So in my vain attempt to offset the myriad of obviously myopic viewers that have voted 10 for this movie, I give it a 1/10.