visually great but that's it - way overrated

Rating: Null/10 (11 April 2004)

I sat through this movie yesterday. The special effects and the visuals were great, as in the previous two parts. They are pretty much what you would expect after reading the books (which I did a long time ago).
Ok, so everything looks nice, but otherwise the movie(s) had little to offer. I do not want to bash the movie(s) too much because they made such a good effort in illustrating the books, so this will be brief. Some of the problems were that the characters are very thin, the dialogue is terrible, and the music mediocre at best. The movie(s) also have this tendency of just marching through the obligatory plot events at a rapid pace. Therefore, while sitting through the movie(s), I noticed I really did not care what happens to these creatures: we are for example supposed to like the good guys because they are so beautiful/handsome (as opposed to the ugly bad guys) and because we are told they are great, but there is hardly any screen time for them to demonstrate any of these good characteristics as persons (except for their nice manners compared with those of the bad guys).
I guess a 300-hour TV series might have been a much better format to fully present the material (as long as they would fix the dialogue and the music). But that would have been impossible ?