I was bludgeoned

Rating: 9/10 (26 December 2001)

Peter Jackson's FOTR is a movie designed to quite literally beat a movie audience into submission. For three hours you are bombarded with enough imagery, action, characters, and plot to give the average hobbit an aneurysm. It's been a week since I saw the movie and I'm still grappling with the experience.
The fight scenes - and there are a lot of fight scenes - make your mind and eye whirl. Its like a super fast merry-go-round. You know that there are a lot of things happening, but its happening so fast that your brain can't keep up. Regardless, the experience as a whole is much too marvelous to ever turn your back on.
The characters are so real they seem strangely out of place in the genre of fantasy. Gandalf is the grandfather I never had but always wanted. Smart, edgey and wise. Ian Holms conjures a wonderfully flawed 3-D Bilbo Baggins that is likable, laughable but at times frightening. The elves also deserve special mention. They are both charming and calming. Perhaps it's the ears.
The sets and the scenes are pure magic. As a New Zealander I am very familiar with the landscape of my home country, but Peter Jackson somehow shot an eerier New Zealand then the one I know. Every place shown is strangely familiar, but completely different in mood and feel.
The one flaw that irritated me throughout the movie is that the CGI - in parts - looks like it belongs in Toy Story. For the most part however, Middle-Earth swallowed me whole and left me happy to have been overwhelmed by the experience.