Did anyone else find this movie lacking

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2003)

I saw the movie and found that while it may have been a good book, (I didn't read it, but most that did had good things to say about it.) it definitely lacked many things that make a good movie. The point of a good movie based on a book is that the movie can stand alone without the knowledge of the actual book text. Return of the King in my opinion has a very hard time doing that. Return of the King basically lacked the same direction as The Two Towers. In The Two Towers Aragorn came forward as the leader and hero and by the end of the movie you are looking forward to the next one so that you can see him go into battle once more. Did this happen? Nope. In the Return of the King we see Froto and Sam 2/4 of the movie (1/4 would have been ok because Froto has to destroy the ring, but his character makes no new developments so it makes the movie a sleeper at parts). Then we see Meriadoc and Pippen along with Eowyn and a few other side characters. In the first and second movie these characters didn't even build to the climax of the movie. Eowyn seemed to be intrigued by Aragorn in the Two Towers, this disappears in the Return of the King and we are left with her and one of the halflings going into battle. So the should-be subplot characters take up another 1/4 of the movie. That leaves only 1/4 (very possibly less) of the movie dedicated to Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas. I don't know about the rest of you but I felt ripped off when I walked out of the movie expecting to see my heroes from The Two Towers fight again and instead get 2 and a half hours of halflings fighting for humanity instead of seeing Aragorn do it. I was disappointed.