A worthy epic successor

Rating: 8/10 (18 December 2002)

I anticipated this film like none other, and was not disappointed. I believe the LoTR trilogy to be the greatest of all time and of course this movie was brilliant in all of the same ways that the first one was. In this review I will not list all of the good things about this film because there are too many, although the adapion of Gollum was breathtaking and wonderful. That said, I did have some complaints.
1) In my opinion the battle scenes were not as cool as they could have been: too much hacking and slashing not enough impressive feats of strength and dexterity.
2) Gimli was turned into a walking punchline. While it was very funny and provided moments of comic relief, I think he should really be more of a badass than a comedian.
3) Distorting the book. I know this is bound to happen but Jackson did it less in the first movie.
That said, it was an incredible experience seeing this movie. Not a perfect masterpiece (like the first one) but an absolutely worthy successor.
8/10