It's a highly overrated film.

Rating: 4/10 (1 March 2004)

My comment here is merely an effort to lead the ignorant, fawning masses to the water, but I have no faith whatsoever that any of them will drink of it. The biggest bone of contention I have is with the tiresomely oft-repeated nonsense that books cannot be adapted accurately to the screen. To attempt to defend Peter Jackson and these films with this claptrap is particularly misguided. Does not a picture speak a thousand words? Has not Peter Jackson used ten hours of pictures? By that measure, he could have covered Tolkien's trilogy 300 times over! To have been given ten hours and such a huge budget, was an unprecedented opportunity but what did Jackson do with it? He made his own interpretation. He got to make these three films because *Tolkien's* The Lord of the Rings demanded it. It wasn't right to use the opportunity to spend the time and money making his own hacked-up version; to *change* the story, alter characters, omit characters, change the locations of events, *make up* various events. That he did all this was sheer hubris – but since he's made profits, he's gotten away with it and only Tolkien's faithful are saddened and sickened. Bear in mind the money and success that Jackson has reaped by climbing on Tolkien's shoulders, having assured fans that he would remain faithful to the book.
To those who really think books (let alone long books) cannot be accurately adapted to the screen, I say take a long hard look at Richard Boleslawski's Les Miserables (1935). Adapted by W.P Lipscomb, Victor Hugo's huge novel (longer than The Lord of the Rings) is faithfully covered in just 108 minutes. Peter Jackson had over five times that, so there is absolutely no excuse for altering the story in any way.
I'm absolutely certain that any director in the business could have achieved movies at least as good as Jackson's given the same opportunity; and any director that had the brains to stick to the proper story would have produced *better* ones. The Lord of the Rings is apparently the second most popular book after the Holy Bible, which, I would say, suggests that Tolkien writes a story a tad better than a certain Peter who?