If only all movies were this good, fantasy or otherwise.

Rating: 9/10 (19 December 2003)

What everyone else says, goes double for me. This movie rocks! I won't bore people with a long and gushing praise-singing of the film. In fact, I'm going to do the exact opposite. I'm going to pick out the tiny faults that stopped me from giving the film a 10 and only a 9 in the ratings.
Firstly, it was just TOO much! The battle scenes were SO busy, I'm expecting to have to watch them several times more just in order to see everything that was going on. A minor niggle, really, but it will make me watch the movie again, so that's no bad thing.
Secondly, what happened to Saruman? Not a hair do we see of him in the theatrical version. I only hope his scenes are added to the extended DVD version which will no doubt be released next year. Somehow, Pippin finding the Palantir in the water at the foot of Orthanc isn't nearly as satisfying as having Grima throw it at the group. I hope they change that back for the DVD.
Thirdly, really an extension of the above I suppose, there are a number of points in the movie where it was apparent that they had cut out bits to save on running time. I trust these will be restored in the DVD as well.
Finally, , at the end, was I the only one who felt that Gollum and Frodo's struggle for the Ring was just a little bit silly? I think they should have done that from both Sam's viewpoint (as in the movie) and also from Frodo's perspective in the Shadow-world, and inter-cut the two. That way they could have shown Gollum's solution to getting the Ring back in more detail and it wouldn't have looked quite so silly.
But all of the above are really minor gripes, most of which I hope will be fixed in the extended DVD.
All in all, the three movies are a fine set of films and I'm hoping they will revive interest in the fantasy genre amongst the movie studios. It would also be nice to see fantasy films being treated as story and character driven epics rather than excuses to overindulge in special effects at the expense of any plot or character development. Anyone remember the abyssmal "Dungeons and Dragon" movie? Yech! So here's hoping that the LOTR trilogy will bring about a renaissance in fantasy movie making.
And even if they don't, we'll always have these three - well, I will, anyway, in my DVD collection.