Good and Bad...

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2003)

The much-awaited finale of the trilogy has finally arrived and what a feast for the eyes!!! The film is truly grandiose, it's got great special effects and it'll leave u in awe when you leave the cinema...
Peter Jackson has definitely done a job for which he'll be remembered forever. The sole task of shooting these three films must have been huge and all credits to the man who had the courage to go for it. And he can be proud of the end result.
The special effects, of course, is the great winner. The epic battle scenes, full of so much colour and action, and detail, was magnificent. The scenery is also great. Really makes you wanna go see New Zealand, even if only for the great mountains....Breathtaking is the word I was looking for...
The acting is also great. Elijah Woods is great with his expressions of fear, tiredness, weakness, sadness, obsession, etc, etc...He does a great job, but then, so do Sean Astin, Ian Mckellan and Andy Serkis....
But then we come to what destroys the film....especially if you are a fan of the book....However much the film does justice to the book in terms of its grandeur, it doesn't in terms of the story...
Cutting out the whole of the battle for the Shire at the end was a rather disappointing idea. That whole bit in the book makes the story more relevant for these 4 Hobbits who have risked their lives to destroy a ring (and it explains Wormtongue and Saruman away...). Okay, the film was going to be too long, but it could still be done. Firstly, it didn't need to be too long a battle scene at the end. And then, they could have cut out on the hyper-extended farewell scenes AND all the unneeded additions made to the story line throughout the 2nd and 3rd book!!!
My other problem with the changes in the story line was that Peter Jackson had apparently set out to make a film based on the book. Changing storylines and characters of commercial modern books is semi-okay, but you cannot go around changing characters in a classic!! How would it look if I made an adaptation of Romeo and Juliette tomorrow and showed Juliette as a tomboy?? A definite no-no... And LOTR is as much of a classic as R&J...
So why not scrap the long-windedness of Faramir's and Aragorn's stories (and they managed to almost totally change Faramir's character...) in the 2nd film and that of Gollum in the 3rd one, and that would have left you enough time to show us the battle for the Shire and maybe a quicker farewell at the end...
But I guess I'm rambling on. So, while I'm talking about the end, I'll end here. But let me just say that however slow the ending was, I didn't want it to end....No more waiting for the next LOTR...Sniff...So, overall, it was a great experience. Not true to the book, but still great and grandiose and worth a watch over and over agan...