Brilliant, beautiful - Failure

Rating: 8/10 (20 December 2001)

I watched the most anticipated movie of my life last night, one I had waited 26 years to see. I desperately wanted it to be the best film of all time and was afraid that my expectations were too high. Now I have seen it, my feelings about it are very ambivalent. The feeling about it depends on where I am coming from, am I watching simply as a cinema goer or as someone who loves the books.
As a movie, it is awesome. The acting fails in one place only and that is Galadriel. I felt that Cate Blanchett was stilted and that her character was too dark. She only became decent after she had past the test. For the rest, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood and all the rest excel at their roles. The scenery, the filming and the CGI were all breathtaking. As a movie I feel that this will take at least two Oscars - Original Score and Effects. It may well take Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Writing - Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.
I have no reservations about the quality of this film and Peter Jackson deserves every scrap of praise that he has received.
So why my reservations. A torturous analogy I tried after seeing it was that while the book was roast beef with all the trimmings, the movie was only roast beef. It had all the main ingredients of Tolkien's meal, but lacked the trimmings to make it as memorable as the book. Too many of the small details which make the book so absorbing were missing. Yes, I know that to include it all would have made the film too long, but was it necessary to include all the stuff about the creation of the Uruk-hai (not in the book) at the expense of other more important elements of the novel. It also seemed to me that in the film Saruman was simply a servant of Sauron, whereas in the book he had his own agenda.
To recap the film was brilliant, it was beautiful, but it failed to capture the essence of the written version. Also, as an afterthought, let me add, it was infinitely better than Bakshi's version.
It is not best film of all time, but it is one of the best. It is probably the best fantasy film of all time, taken on it's own merits and the FX are the best to date.
What rating would I give this film, I don't know. It depends how I view it, on it's own merits or as an adaptation.
On it's own merits 9/10. As an adaptation 6/10. I'll be kind and roundup - overall 8/10