Brilliant. Now bring on the extended edition ...

Rating: 10/10 (21 December 2003)

Excellent film, fantastic, unbelievable. And yet I can't wait for the extended edition, because I saw Two Towers: Extended Edition a few days ago, and it became so obvious that much was cut from the original movie just to save time, not for the good of the story. The extended editiion is a more well rounded experience -- more on the Boromir/Faramir/Denethor background, more on Aragorn & Eowyn, more one liners from Gimli the dwarf, a scene from the Old Forest journey (missed out of film 1) transferred to Fangorn, and we see Tolkien's tremendous concept of the living Fangorn forest moving to Helm's Deep and swallowing fleeing orcs. Why can't we get an (possibly optional) extended edition on DVD of all severely cut movies? I can think of many that would have been improved that way.
Just one criticism of ROTK: the scenes of Gollum fighting thin air look a bit contrived. Can we have a scene interspersed where Frodo in Ring-spooky-land finds himself struggling with Gollum, to get the feeling of the climactic fight better?
Thanks, Peter, for doing this.