Wonderfully captures the spirit of the great book

Rating: 9/10 (13 September 2003)

(This has some small SPOILERs)
When I first heard they were going to do a film trilogy of one of my favorite books, I thought it would never work. It felt impossible to see the spirit of the book on film. How could so magnificent landscapes, characters, monsters and the feel of magic possibly be made to be even close to what it is in the book. And what has this Peter Jackson ever directed? I had never heard of him.
And how wrong I was. Jackson is now, in fact my favorite director, though I´ve only seen four of his films (the two LOTRs, Braindead and Frighteners), but I can see he has a lot of talent, both in macabre horror-comedies and epic action-adventures. And I could´ve never thought New Zealand had such beatiful sceneries. It must be as close as you can get to Middle-Earth on this planet.
Also, almost all the characters are as I pictured them. Ian McKellen is wonderful as Gandalf, John-Rhys Davies makes a nice scottish Gimli and Viggo Mortensen has easily the charisma of Aragorn. Only the hobbits bothered me a bit in the beginning. Eliah Wood isn´t excactly how I thought Frodo would be like and Dominic Monaghan´s Pippin irritated me a bit of his stupidiness and thick accent. But as the movie goes on, I, like any viewer, start to like more and more of the characters.
The movie goes on much like the book, only in the later films Jackson has added some scenes here and there. Now the only addition is Aragorn and Arwen in Rivendell, which is a quite good idea, because the movie has some female beauty in the form of Liv Tyler (And Cate Blanchett later!) and the romance in the book is as dull as the movie´s concept artist´s pencil.
This movie has a lot of great scenes and only one annoying; the cave troll sequence. I´ve read also other reviews who hated this part, but having a big monster looking behind a pillar where a character is hiding, first from the left, then from the right and then spotting the hider by looking right again is just stupid and would have fitted better on Jurassic Park III. But as the scene only takes about 1/90 of the film, there isn´t much to complain. I highly recommend, except if you think the idea of a land inhabited by elves, dwarves, wizards and orcs is the stupidest movie idea since the talking dragon in Dragonheart, don´t bother.
10/10
The best part (SPOILER): The battle between Gandalf and the Balrog in the bridge of Khazad-Dûm, which ends of Gandalf falling from the bridge and saying to others "Flee, you fools!" is a modern-day response to the battle between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in the Empire Strikes back