A great disappointment

Rating: 3/10 (9 January 2002)

I seem to be almost alone in not liking this movie... I found it generally lacking the depth of the book - not surprising, as it would be quite impossible to condense the immense amount of material in the book to a movie, however long.
However, I entered it fully expecting things to change. Unfortunately, I just found a rather poorly done movie.
Some aspects were wonderful, yes. The visuals were spot-on, for the most part. The effects were stunning (with a few exceptions...). But the script... oh, the script!
My biggest problem was the general simplification of things. The incredible mystery of the book, the sense that what starts out as a simple adventure is actually a vastly larger story is quite lacking. They simply gave away too much - the information in the voiceover at the beginning for example, was a complete waste of time: why give away all of that at the beginning? Why not show things from the hobbits point of view? "A silly fellow went off on an adventure, and brought back treasure, among which was a ring!" And then start revealing more and more of the story gradually - this could be easily done with explanations by Gandalf and Elrond, exactly as it was in the book.
Likewise, other "mysterious" aspects were just dropped - showing Gandalf and Saruman's battle was a fine example. A much better way of doing this would be to simply have the hobbits arrive at the Prancing Pony and not find Gandalf! As it is, the audience knew exactly what was happening right at the start, ruining the suspense..
In general, a vast story, full of intrigue and a great sense of things being larger than just the small part the characters play was reduced to a jolly adventure story. Even this adventure was poorly executed - the mood of the most poignant moments was ruined by falling back on cheesy cliches and feeble attempts at humour.. In Moria, for example, right before Gandalf's 'death', the terrible "dwarf-tossing" joke. Sure, it's silly.. but it makes a part of the story that could have been genuinely terrifying a complete spoof! Ruins the mood entirely.. Likewise, the pathetic battle scene antics: first of all, shake the camera violently whenever there's any action, and then use all the cliches you can: the bit where one of the hobbits looks to the left, sees the monster, then looks to the right and sees the monster. Then back to the left: no monster! And he relaxes. Then the monster jumps out from the right again!
Oh eek.
Finally, big parts of the story just didn't make much sense without the background present in the book: the trip to the mountains, for example, was a complete waste of time. It would have been better to just cut that, and leave more time to develop some of the other bits that were severely lacking - the entire time spent in lothlorien was quite useless as presented. "Wicked elf witch"? If it's going to be simplified that much, (and I acknowledge that it's necessary in a movie adaptation, and expect it!) why not rearrange it in a way that at least makes sense? Half the actions in the movie seemed to be done simply because it was a way to have a jolly adventure, rather than because there was actually any reason to do it.
Anyway... It was a let down. Luckily, I managed to avoid the hype, and didn't get my hopes up at all. But it was much worse than I expected. I'm amazed that I seem to be one of the few that thought this way...