Great but battles too long

Rating: 9/10 (23 December 2002)

The movie is more than great in terms of effects and pictures - maybe the best you've ever seen before. Forget about all other Sci-Fi or Fantasy pictures. Peter Jackson's direction is magic: He managed to combine three separate stories but the audience never get really lost. Maybe because of the quite poor story contend ?? Unfortunately you may tell the story of this 3 hour picture in only two sentences. The separated groups are following their ways and are meeting some creatures. By the way they help to win the different big (at Helm's) or small battles of the humans against the armies of Sauron. The Merry & Pippin plot is a very weak element in the film. Speaking and running trees are very hard to imagine for all of us humans and therefore the look of these scenes is artificial. Here we reach the limits of putting written words in moving images !? It reminds me of the creatures in "the neverending story" and it just doesn't fit in these great epic picture which looks so real - although the moving trees' effects are not really bad the scenes look childish and you see in every second that Merry and Pippin are filmed in the studio. The battle scenes in Rohan are far too long and maybe a little too violent. The best part of the movie is the Gollum-Frodo-Sam plot. Gollum is definitely THE star of this movie. The best animation ever realized in film history. This creature LIVES and has a torn schizo-character ! Unbelievable !
All in all - big fun and stunning pictures. You never get bored - anyway 8 out of 10 ! But the first part was better !
Mike Bernhardt