Just OK. Nothing new here.

Rating: 4/10 (30 September 2006)

I am in that boat of people who must have seen a different movie.
This is just a louder, bigger version of Two Towers (Which was OK good and easily the best of the three). Well, there's another war on and we still don't have enough soldiers, so we're in for certain defeat. But then suddenly more support shows up from an unexpected quarter. But we still don't have enough, so we find even more unlikely help and a huge, CGI battle ensues. Then there is a ton of action, fun to watch I guess, though the graphics get *very* dodgy in places.
Meanwhile the parts with Gollum drag ON and ON (!!) and are exactly the same as in Two Towers. Well, he's leading the hobbits along for another hour and a half, and we don't know if we can trust him, and he has about 40 conversations with his "Evil Self" about how he's going to betray them. (Or NOT?! The suspense is dreadfully boring!) There is something *really* wrong when the only character that gets dialogue is the one constantly ranting about the "Precious."
Whose movie is this, anyway? Who is the main character, again??
Aragorn still feels conflicted about the same girl from the second one, and we get more weird flashbacks to Arwen and the supposed relationship that he has with her but that we've never seen and don't understand why he's so attached to her. Worse, while Part Two reduced Gimli to a scarce and bumbling punchline, Legolas is a ghost here with no lines who spends most of his screen time as a poorly-rendered CGI version of himself.
That's very sad, since we all know that people are only there to see Orlando Bloom. Well, he and Frodo are the only interesting characters. We all know it. This is why all those elves showed up randomly at Helm's Deep in Part 2. The audience loves Legolas and adores his cute little species and wants to take them all home and snuggle them. But the whole Aragorn/Arwen thing is just confusing and insubstantial and no one wants to take them home. (In all fairness, Aragorn hasn't showered in the 6 years we've been waiting for this epic to end.)
The pacing in this film is horrible. As with Two Towers, some scenes are way too long, and there is plenty more that you wish they would take the time to explain. Giant eagles show up out of nowhere. A new villain appears and he is supposedly a most feared and notorious character, but no one has heard of him and we never find out who he is or where he came from. And the evil wizard (Sauron?) just vanishes from the film at about the 3/4 mark. I guess he walked off the project and they forgot to write an ending for him? A lot of the characterization is just repetitive, like Sam who has no role except to encourage Frodo and keep him going, and a lot of it is just inexplicable, like the continued absence of black riders and ringwraiths. I guess they went extinct or something at the end of Part 1? Maybe they went on break and just never came back.
The story also jumps around between so many different characters that you have to be well-versed in the lore to be able to follow it. You're probably used to that already since Part Two had us careening between epic battle sequences, boring Gollum leading Frodo, and that giant Tree walking along carrying the other hobbits for an hour. The scene leaps here are even more jarring since even more characters get screen time in flashbacks and lots of those "Meanwhile, back at Headquarters..." moments.
I also did not really "get" the ending (When you go on that boat with Gandalf, does that mean you die, or..?) and it dragged on in a lot of sappiness and goodbyes. It was also a big jolt right after the battle scene to have everything so happy and wonderful, and suddenly Aragorn is king and has even less personality than before, if that's possible. It was all so joyous but at the same time so bland and weird and not fun. And Sam getting married: Who cares?
(It was made official several years ago: No one cares about Sam. I guess Pete Jackson didn't get the memo.)
There is some genuinely scary stuff in this movie (the huge spider and the ghost soldiers), and it held my attention OK and didn't *feel* long, but it was unsatisfying on the grandest scale. It always is when you spend this much time with characters but don't get to know them. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a very expensive One-Trick Pony. People say this one is the best, but I think that just because it's all finally over and we can get back to our lives instead of spending years analyzing how so many people can love a movie like this when it is so obviously not very good.
I agree, too. The obscenely expensive FX already look dated and will be embarrassing pretty soon.