Technically outstanding, dramaturgically weak

Rating: 6/10 (22 March 2004)

I reckon it is because we know of the successful ending to the story that takes all the surprises from the script. I was disappointed nonetheless: Every word spoken is "heavy" and full of "meaning", the battle scene with the riders taking on the elephants is outright stupid-silly. No smart military leader would ever have ordered to attack such foe head-on (and still succeed...). You could bet that in each and every new scene, trouble was only about 30 seconds away. Very annoying. Did Aragon ever smile once? Always looked like having a big tummy ache. Any of the others smiling? OK, Gandalf did once, I think. The end was as kitchy as it could be - and incomprehensible, to me at least: Why would Frodo choose to leave the Shire?? It may be in the book or not, I don't care. This just didn't make any sense.^
Technically of course it was more than state of the art, but even this got me bored eventually. I was glad when this part and the whole series was finally over.
This project would have been better served in a TV series of say 900 minutes or so. Of course, it would have lost the big-screen "oversize" which was nice most of the times. But the movies as long as they were did not do justice to the books. Probably no movie(s) could ever achieve this.