Mediocre at Best

Rating: 1/10 (6 April 2020)

Despite having a love for fantasy, I just watched this movie for the first time at 26. To be fair, I had attempted to watch this on two other occasions, but couldn't make it past thirty minutes both times. Today, I committed myself to this movie with the hope to finally understand what the hype about it was, and to say I'm disappointed is an understatement.
There is no way to comprehend the events of this movie without having read the book. I had to turn to the person who I was watching it with, and even their answers didn't help clarify any of my confusion.
Who were these people? What did they want? Why were they doing what they were doing?
You shouldn't have to ask that of a movie whether it's based off a book or not.
Additionally, the actors dialogue was not loud or clear enough for me to hear most of what they were saying - which certainly added to my confusion. This was something that also really annoyed me with the show, The Witcher, and eventually led me to giving up on it. And it has nothing to do with the "historical dialect," because I loved Pride and Prejudice, but some of the scenes were just so soft spoken and it was very frustrating.
It's also too long, even for someone like me who can handle sitting through lengthy movies like Avengers: End Game and The Wolf of Wall Street. Part of the problem for Lord of the Rings, at least to me, was that many of the scenes, especially dying or near death scenes were soooo drawn out and could have been shortened greatly. I just felt like I did a lot of waiting around throughout this film.
Anyway to sum it up, this movie, the characters, the plot sadly offered me nothing.