Emperor's New Clothes

Rating: 4/10 (18 February 2002)

Good, lord, How overrated can a film become? While it certainly is
fun to watch, amazing scenery and mattework do not add up to a
"great" film. It was one long loud soundtrack surrounding hours of
screaming, wailing screaming, actors talking in gutteral tones to
denote seriousness with some more screaming on top. Half the
dialog centered around telling Frodo that he was the one to
complete the journey. I couldn't believe how many times each
actor got the chance to scream the word, "NO" in slow motion
because I lost count one hour before it ended. If you like pretty
packaging, a smattering of schmaltz, non-ending slow motion
photography to fill in for gaps and dialog lost in unintelligible
accents, this film will be a winner for you. But if you've decided that
ET was not the best film ever made, you'll have long realized that
it's a flashy re-working of a book with tons of pretty window
dressing to replace quality storytellng. In fact, Ralph Bakshi's
partial animation version, not only achieved more suspense and
fright but he did it with a lot less that $4 billion dollars worth of
computer technology, thus automatically making it a superior film.
We've all seen this kind of eyecandy before.