very disappointing

Rating: Null/10 (20 February 2003)

In FOTR, Jackson made all the right changes to successfully bring a complex story to the screen. In TTT, he made all the wrong changes. There are endless trivial scenes (e.g. oliphants) which do practically nothing for the plot, while major plot elements were missing. The resulting film is full of consistency errors and plot holes, so much that it utterly fails to hold together. It's like watching the video to the sound track of TTT -- lots of action, lots of cool scenery, lots of music, but no discernable plot.
It's also LOOOONG. That wouldn't be such a problem -- who didn't expect it to be long? -- except that it's not the plot of TTT that makes the film long. The film is long because of all the boring stuff that was added while the plot was tossed in the trash. Romance scenes go on, and on, and on, and on, and on. An added warg scene is so contrived it bored me to tears -- the danger is so utterly mismatched to the character that it is impossible to take it seriously.
In exchange for all this added pap, the Ents are glossed over to the point of being utterly unbelievable -- they come off as a pat, contrived resolution to the threat of Isengard that FOTR spent so much time establishing.
In all, it's a film of painstaking detail, stunning visual effects, and a script that completely fails -- in other words a typical Hollywood film. It's particularly disappointing after FOTR, which demonstrated very well that you can, in fact, produce a movie with a plot and still make money.