Good not great

Rating: 6/10 (24 December 2001)

I think some praise is deserved for this movie but I can't see calling in the greatest movie ever. I won't go into what it does well because some many others have already. What I will do is tell you what I didn't like.
I thought the movie did not do a good job conveying the difference between Hobbits, Man, Dwarves, and Elves. Maybe this is impossible to do in a 3 hour movie but I came away with the sense that the Hobbits were scripted and acted as if they were just young farm boys. The film did not do a good job explaining just how out of the ordinary the adventures of Frodo and Bilbo were when considering they were Hobbits. In addition it relied only back lighting, costume, and voice to differentiate between elf, man, and dwarf.
Where are the songs? The book relied heavily on song that is completely left out. I admit it would have been very hard to capture the magic of the songs without coming of silly but surely the `greatest movie of all time' could have done it. People rave about the music but ignore this simple fact. In addition I didn't consider the score to rival Glory or other movies with great scores. It wasn't bad but I didn't come away remembering any particular tune like in Star Wars or Indiana Jones.
In addition the movie did a poor job of conveying the fact that this was actually a long journey and not a weekend hike.
Lastly, the movie has no end. Granted this is because it is part of a series but most great stories at least come to some kind of conclusion while the epic continues. Think of the first Start Wars movie. In that movie there was a story that continue on but at least the audience was left with the satisfaction of some kind of accomplishment with the destruction of the death star. In this movie we are left with nothing of the sort. The excitement in building up to an epic battle and the ultimate result of such battle while not new is a powerful thing that makes or breaks many great movies. In this we are left with a skirmish in the woods. It was OK but not great. Granted this is a limitation of working with the book but one must consider that this limitation does take away from the movie and for that reason alone I could never consider this the greatest movie of all time.
In the end the movie suffers from what most adaptations suffer from. Less character development/definition (Hobbits aren't just farmboys with furry feet) and any limitations that existed in the original work.