Solid movie, but you can't please everyone all the time.

Rating: 8/10 (28 December 2001)

*** This comment contains minor spoilers ***
The production team faced a serious dilemmas working on their adaption of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. They had to make the films accessible to the mainstream crowd to get a good return on the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in this project, and they wanted to "stay true to Tolkien's vision", as Peter Jackson put it in an interview with German television.
The did a pretty good job on both accounts.
Whereas several episodes of Tolkien's original story had to be rearranged to make the plot easier to understand for the masses, most important details have been left where they belong. True, Arwen UndÃ³miel (Liv Tyler) has a much smaller role in the books, but this being a mainstream movie, you have to include a female character as an identification point for female viewers and an eye catcher for the males. And lets not forget that times have changed since J.R.R. Tolkien's British university old boys club days. Though it would have been nicer to have Gandalf and especially Elrond call to the river Bruinen to sweep the Ringwraiths away, to get a notion of the vast power they possess. And do you truly believe that the average movie goer would have been interested in watching 15 more minutes of the council of Elrond, instead a few cool fight scenes? Which where in my opinion not that cool. True, there are many impressive shots, but overall I found them to have to many cuts, especially in the Moria fights. I hope this will improve in "The Two Towers".
The special effects and the production/visual design were outstanding in most scenes, as has to be expected, given the vast production budget.
The only two gripes I have with effects and production design are the look of the stone troll, which was much to smooth skinned, after all it is born from stone and fashioned after an ent, and the tempting of Galadriel, a little bit of red would have been much preferable to the blue tones used in the scene.
My only somewhat bad impression comes from the dialogue scripts. Although I see a certain validity in the argument that the dialogue had to be adapted to modern taste, we are dealing with epic fantasy here.
Sacrifice, death, grand battles, the destruction of almost everything good in the world. This is not a D&D (tm) movie. I firmly believe that pathos has its place in modern pop culture.
Overall I'd rate the film at 75 out of 100 possible points.