"...anyone who has read the book would know..."

Rating: 9/10 (26 December 2001)

There will be two types of people who go to see The Lord of The Rings. Those who have read the books (and who might also have studied Tolkien's other works), and those who are new to Middle Earth.
The Lord of The Rings is considered by many to be the greatest work of imaginative fiction last century, and the reviewer if of this opinion. A review of the book is best handled elsewhere.
It would be easy to start any review of LOTR with "...anyone who has read the book would know...no movie could ever do the book justice". But this would simply amount to trite literary snobbery. Of course, there will be many millions who see the movie with no previous knowledge of Middle Earth.

I am a four-time reader of LOTR, back in my teen years, as well some years consumed by Tolkien lore thereafter. Reading Tolkien books is (and always will be) a rite of passage for many escapist boys of pubescent age, and I was one of them.
The movie clearly has much to offer the viewer. In this age of ever-competing attractions, in that Las Vegas land of brightly flashing lights competing for your attention and dollar, entertainment has to be delivered in short (even for three hours, LOTR is short compared against the written work), intense bursts...
LOTR did not fail to please me, and Peter Jackson is to be commended on an astounding technical masterpiece, and cinematic history is obliged to chalk it up as a triumph, and no doubt as the financial success it must surely turn out to be.
Sets, props, makeup and acting are uniformly excellent.

LOTR is not perfect, no motion picture ever will be. Much is left out from the original novel; some camera angle do not work...and look for that huge zit below Frodo's lip in one scene, which has miraculously disappeared in the next!
Another fault (though a limitation of the medium, rather than any fault of the movie maker), is that the vast distances that the Fellowship have to travel are not really conveyed to the viewer...for example, when Gandalf rides of to see Saruman, it seems like he's only nipped around the corner, and not the many weary leagues the journey actually took. when Arwen

But movie-making is a flawed process, and Jackson has done an enormously satisfying job, given the limitations of the format.
I do believe that one day a "time-line" edition of LOTR will be produced, when computers of the day will be able to cope with the insane amount of data that would be required to simulate every blade of grass and every character's action in Middle Earth, from Shire to Mount Doom. Only then, will the full grandeur of LOTR be comprehended...or, you could just read the book ;)