Kicked in the kidneys by my true love

Rating: 1/10 (4 January 2002)

I went in to this movie with cynicism suspended - my faith in the magic of movies having been restored by "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" - and with my arms held open and a song in my heart.
I emerged feeling like I'd been mugged by my beloved grandma.
Peter Jackson is, quite simply, a coward and a scoundrel. He has cheated his masters at AOL-Time Warner, and he has cheated us, the paying customer. Here is why:
He spent his producers' money filming most of the book, then allowed *half * of each sub-plot or piece of character development to be cut. Cowardice. If you're not going to show where Bill the pony came from, don't waste our time saying goodbye to him. OR, don't present Gimli's antipathy to elves, and then cut the reversal of it. CHOOSE ONE STORY AND SHOW IT! I'm sure that all this will be restored and forgiven in the director's cut (wait until 2004), but that's a devious and underhand way to build an enduring legacy.
The action scenes however, cannot be rescued. They were set up largely to showcase the talents of Peter's friends at WETA. CGI and brutal jump cuts were used *instead* of any kind of choreography or placement or motion. Compare with "Starship Troopers", which had as much showcasing, but supporting and not dictating the action.
The acting... oh, the acting. Good old Sean Bean stuck out like a sore thumb by actually expressing two or more nuances at once. That's at least one more than everyone else, sometimes two. There was enough over-emoting here to make Olivier blush. Fortunately, the heavy handed and woefully generic score overbore more of the monologues, and so we can pretend we didn't hear the more embarrasing pronouncements.
Camerwork? You used to know how to do that, Peter. There were so many extreme close ups that I wonder if this film was sponsored by a makeup company. Either that, or the camera leapt out to pan around a piece of empty landscape with a blurry piece of CGI architecture perched precariously (and erratically) on top of it. The quality of the CGI in these scenes was no better than the painted backdrops on old Star Trek sets.
And the pacing. It made me weep. Days of dreary dawdling in the Shire, then RUSH to the next scene, then linger longingly over a piece of WETA CGI, then RUSH again, dawdle, linger, RUSH, linger, RUSH, dawdle, RUSH, linger, cue Enya, roll end credits. Cut some more scenes, coward! Peter might as well have not filmed Lothlorien at all, for all the spectacle or drama or the development that it provided, and have had Frodo pick up the Phial at Rivendel from Arwen. That's no bigger a heresy than cutting Bombadil and the Barrow, and having the hobbits receive their swords from Aragorn - who happens to be carrying exactly FOUR hobbit sized swords. Lucky guess, eh?
Nothing sums this film up better than the Indiana Jones scene in Moria. It's about 3 minutes long, utterly pointless, and is resolved through providence rather than action. It exists for two reasons only: to showcase WETA (yet again) and to crowbar in two "jokes" aimed at the sort of viewer who finds "Jackass" amusing. Consider that those three minutes could have gone on character development. Split that between Gimli and Legolas, and that would have given them, oh, ninety-FIVE seconds each. John Rhys-Davies had the skin burned off his face by an allergic reaction to his makeup (five hours to put on!), and THIS is his payback? Six lines, and being the butt of goofball "humour"? For shame.
So, we have a movie with no characterisation, poor camerawork, shoddy action scenes, awful score, pace that is both dawdling AND rushed, and scenes cut from the book to make way for unnecessary CGI. It's telling that the highlight (for me) was Sean Bean commenting that Narsil is "Still sharp". I heard that as "Still Sharpe," Sharpe being the character that Sean is most famous for portraying. It might *not* have been a sly reference, but I choose (dear god, I choose) to believe that it *is*, because I so want to like anything Peter Jackson produces. And nothing else in this big old dull mess comes anywhere near to the standard that I expect of him.
Raving fanboys, explain to me what's left to love, because I'm at a loss. As a movie, this is simply awful. If you think otherwise, you're judging it as something else entirely.
I propose that Peter Jackson would have better served everyone involved - himself, his cast, us, and AOL Time-Warner - by just replacing Gimli with Arwen and having her do a lot of bathing under waterfalls and such. This is both a token and mediocre adaptation AND a poor film: a strong nudge either way could have rescued it, but Peter chose to took the coward's middle ground and left us with movie popcorn - loud, tasty on the outside, superficially satisfying, but eventually leaving you feeling empty and craving something more substantial.