a biased opinion.

Rating: 4/10 (12 March 2002)

I suppose you'd have to have read the novels to begin to enjoy this movie (I use the word enjoy to mean only the most remote bastardization of the word.) When analyzing the film (purely the film!) anyone with even the most passive taste in movies will lump this one into the "not so good, not so bad pile." And thats were it belongs. The screenplay, having been based on a novel, is alright. The characters, having been based on ones in a novel, are ok, even though in the whole run of the 3 hour dragger-onner the only character who gets developed at all is Frodo. We have no information of why, or from were, the elf, the dwarve, or the "other human who is 'NOT' the strider character" has chosen to join frodo on his journey. In the book (I haven't read the book) I assume they were given their own chapters and backstories, butt in the movie, theyre just thrown into the muddled mess. The world itself is quite expansive and beautiful even if there are only sparse amounts of under-developed civilizations here and there. There are some nifty parts, like the beginning prelude (if only the whole movie could have been that cool, sigh :[), and the few developed characters are interesting (most notably gandolph - he reminds me of a reverse-pointy hat esoteric magi from early final-fantasy games.) Butt on a whole, the movie falls short. It too closely follows the ideas already established by earlier fantasy films/litarature. Of course it does this rightly so, as I understand that Tolkien's writings were pretty influential. Hokey battle scenes, black and white good vs. evil, and laughable cg characters just crush what potential the movie had. And hey, Don't think I'm some kinds of fantasy-hater. I play lots of rpg's, used to read those d&d-clone books, and was pretty excited to see LOTR. Butt this movie was just one big dissapointment. It was a bigger let-down than Star Wars: Episode One, the Phantom Menace.

4.5/10