What are you all thinking?

Rating: 6/10 (7 August 2002)

Ok, this is really not a review as such, so I'll keep it brief.
At the time of writing, the IMDb users have this movie voted as the #4 best movie of all time.
Why? Are you all out of your minds? To me it's riddled with problems. Sure it has some nice cinematography, but the character development is incredibly superficial (and I mean down to the point that if you hadn't read the book, you probably wouldn't even remember who some of the major character's names were until you'd been watching the movie for 2 hours).
Jackson has 3 hours to try to convey Sam's devotion to Frodo, and the individual pesonalities of the other three young Hobbits, but by the end of the movie Sam is only just beginning to fill out as a character, and the other two are just cardboard cutouts.
To be fair, the film begins well, is often glorious visually, and ends well, with some great action sequences in the last 45 minutes, but well before then I was getting bored and losing interest in the lethargic middle section, which seemed to contribute nothing much of value except some plot details which could have been revealed far more quickly.
It's not a bad movie at all - I gave it 6 out of 10 - but you blokes have it rated above dozens of cinema's all time greats. Come on, you've got to be kidding. There's no way a movie this imperfect deserves to be in the top 100, let alone the top 4.
At least it's way better than Ralph Bakshi's atrocious 1980 attempt, but for me this movie just proves what I suspected all along. No film is ever going to do justice to the book.