Only 200 minutes?

Rating: 1/10 (22 June 2004)

I really enjoyed this movie -- well about 45 minutes of it.
Unless you are a die-hard fanatic for the LOTR books (and maybe even then) you'll want to watch this with one finger on the fast forward button.
Some scenes were excellent, but not enough when diluted by so much "filler." The special effects may have been masterful, but they didn't make it a great movie.
The movie simply takes itself far too seriously; how else could the director possibly justify being almost 3.5 hours long!?!
Similarly to voters here -- this is rated as #3 in the top 250 of all time. That is *SO ASTOUNDINGLY OVERRATED* that I cannot understand it (this with 65,000+ votes). It probably belongs in the top 1000, perhaps about #800. [How has the studio managed to create 45k+ IMDB accounts to skew the voting?]
The basic flaw of the entire trilogy is that it's based on a long-winded, violently racists set of books. Starting from that, you end up with.... well, you know.
Truthfully, this is a 7/10 -- but it could have been a 7.5 if they'd actually done some editing down to ~1.5 hours.