Poorly adapted...

Rating: 3/10 (23 December 2001)

I'm the biggest Tolkien fan ever; I've read the book many times, and I've made all my friends read the book as well. (It's a condition of my friendship.) Perhaps these are the reasons why I was so disappointed with the movie. I can't judge...I didn't stay for the whole thing. What little I saw consisted of sappy background music and hobbits hugging people. Really, I thought they were Teletubbies. They left out crucial elements in the story, or changed the facts in sloppy afterthought. For example, they cut out the Old Forest and the Barrow Downs. So then at Weathertop, Strider gives all the hobbits swords...just in time for the fight with the Nazgul...A little unconvincing. The characters were much simpler; Saruman comes to mind. They retooled all of the beauty out of Gandalf's tale of betrayal. These are trifles, but they cut so much out of it, that the movie wouldn't have made sense to me, had I not read the book. For example, in Bree, when they met Strider, they didn't get the letter from Gandalf saying Strider was an okay guy. We just had to rely on Frodo's "hunch." Again, a little unconvincing. What's a palantir? What's an orc? They tried so hard to be cryptic and mystical that they left the audience with little clue as to what's going on. Well, I could go further, but I can sum it all up by saying just this: Read the book...it's much, much better.