My ROTK experience

Rating: 10/10 (17 December 2003)

I got to see the show at midnight Monday night (before it "officially" opened) and I can honestly say I cannot remember ever having a more awesome, amazing, incredible movie experience in my life.
It completely blew me away. I went in with high expectations, obviously because of the quality of the first two movies in the series and how much I really liked them, but this movie easily exceeded my expectations. I loved it.
After seeing FOTR and TTT, I came out of the theater thinking about what I didn't like about the show: Galadriel's weirdness, or Gimli's unnecessary "comic relief" or something like that. When I came out of this movie, there was none of that. I could not think of what I didn't like. It didn't even cross my mind that I might not have liked this or that. I was just awestruck. I didn't really know what to say. Fellowship of the Ring was my old favorite in the series, but this one is my new favorite.
After the movie I went to my car and started it to get the heater going and sat there for probably 20 minutes just soaking it all in. The movie took me to an incredible world. I just sat there, still experiencing it. I didn't want it to end. The show is listed as 3 hrs 20 min, but it was too short. I couldn't get enough of it. I just wanted more.
The CGI in the movie was fantastic. It wasn't until the next afternoon (the day after the show) that I realized that Shelob was CGI. Gollum was just another character. It seemed so invisible to me that it didn't even cross my mind to think about how good the CGI was.
I even got emotional talking about it with my co-workers because the feelings that I had in the movie just came back to me as I was talking about it. There was joy, sorrow, amazement, breath-holding, disgust, surprise, revulsion, awe, laughter, just the full range of emotions. It was just incredible. I seriously did not expect that.
I don't know that she will like it as much as I do. I guess I'd probably be surprised if anyone else did like it as much as I did, but I guess it doesn't really matter that much to me what other people thought of it. It doesn't change the experience I had.
The other cool thing is there will be an extended version that will come out later. I could kind of tell where some parts seemed shorter than they should have been because the scene seemed to be missing a little something. That sounds bad, but it wasn't really that distracting because the movie would whisk me away somewhere else.
Just fantastic...