I honestly wanted this to be great. It was horrible.

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2001)

I hate to see bad reviews, especially if it's a movie I'm looking forward to, so I hate to write this since I know that a great number of people are looking forward to this film. I also hate it when people are angry that a movie doesn't perfectly reflect a book, movies are a different medium and will inherently be different than a book.
Having said that, I'm sorry but they really destroyed a perfectly good story. I know that 3 hours isn't enough time to cover everything that happens in the fellowship of the ring, but they took out too much detail and then rushed everything else. The characters DID have depth and the acting was (for the most part) better than good (but never really great) but this was overshadowed by unnecessarily dramatic camera work and sound effects applied to voices (worst was what they did to the elves voices).
On the other hand, like I said the acting was mostly good, and the characters had depth (at least I thought so). The special effects were nice (although used inappropriately sometimes) and the fight scenes were great. A lot of the landscapes looked right to me, and well most of it looked great.
All in all, I enjoyed watching it, but if I hadn't read the book first, it would have ruined it for me. I think they left out too much detail and tried to compensate by using camera work to make the scenes dramatic when the story would have done that for them if they had let it. Maybe they could have left more out and instead replaced it with narraration and then concentrated on certain scenes, drawing them out more, taking more time on each rather than rushing every single one. I hate to see stuff cut out of a film, but its worse when every bit of it is rushed just to make sure it all gets in, even though you end up leaving some out anyway.