Over hyped and muddled telling of a great story.

Rating: 7/10 (11 January 2004)

I wonder how many Tolkien fans have praised The Lord of the Rings to their friends whilst secretly bemoaning the many narrative gaps, chronological and character errors introduced by the film-makers in an effort to keep the audience's attention? I'm not saying that this is a bad film, far from it; as a piece of theatre it is excellent, well acted, filmed, directed and scored. The problem for me, and several friends I spoke to, was that most of the time watching the film was spent counting the differences between the book and the film. Of course, such a long book as this would have to be greatly cropped to produce a watchable movie, but I felt that some of the disregarded scenes, (such as the journey through the Old Forest and meeting Tom Bombadil, or the Barrow Downs), could have been incorporated without much difficulty.