Good film, but overrated.

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2001)

At the time of writing, LOTR is rated the best in the IMDB database, with a score of 9.5. Thought I agree that it is a good film, this is NOT the best film of all time, and definitely not the best I have seen this year. The one problem that really annoyed me about LOTR (except for my friend talking through the whole thing :-)) was the way in which every race was typecast. I know that this was a problem with the books as well, but I had expected that the characters would become a little more 3D. It was as if Tolkien had had 3 adjectives for each race (elves: noble, wise, holier-than-thou. dwarves: aggressive, self-righteous, small. hobbits: small, naive, childish, etc etc etc) and the film did little to improve on this. Even the main characters (Frodo, Aragorn, et al) seemed far too 2D, and there was little opertunity to explore their characters, mostly because of the constant fights, which never seemed to end, and did get a little monotonous, not to mention impossible to follow thanks to some extremely dodgy 'camera' work.
However, all this said, I did like this movie, because it is, underneath it all, a good story with a good plot. Shame about the characters, really :-)