My hopes were probably too high... :(

Rating: 4/10 (30 March 2003)

I am an immense Tolkien fan, but rather enjoyed Mr. Jackson's last installment of the trilogy despite of this, and so was looking forward tremendously to this movie. I knew that I would come out of the theater upset, but didn't foresee how just how upset I would be! It's not just that they didn't stick close to the book. Making art from someone else's art is a tricky feat, and I completely understand that to make it a true work of art, the director has to make the piece his, and making the piece his includes injecting his own experiences and interpretations to the piece.
It's just that Mr. Jackson had some pretty whacked out interpretations!
For example, Faramir. In the books, Faramir is supposed to be Boromir's redemption - here he is just a jerk. This really ticked me off. And WHAT was up with taking Frodo to Gondor? (Don't even get me started on Arwen!)
And, as someone has already said, the switches between scenes were sort of distracting. They lent to a heavily sort of "soap opera" feel rather than the epic feel that the books had - and when it comes down to it, that's the major problem of this movie. It just didn't have the right feel. I would have enjoyed it enough as a simple fantasy movie if I hadn't already have read the books and reveled in the brilliance of them. I mean, like I said, it's not that Mr. Jackson made changes. But I just didn't get the feeling that Mr. Jackson understood in the slightest sense what the actual point of the books IS. He messed around with the ESSENCE of the story, and that was what really annoyed me.
That Mr. Jackson just doesn't GET the books is evident in two different ways. One is the subtle shifting of the focus of the books from the melancholy of a dying way of life - the Elves having to leave Middle Earth, the passing of the age - to a sort of celebration of the forging of the way of man. The second, and most grieving, is that I can't see, as evidenced from this movie, that he really GETS the core of the good/evil conflict.

I'm not doing a very good job of expressing myself. Simply put, I guess I'm saying that I thought that the movie could have done with a little more focus on Frodo and his inner battle than on Aragorn and his love troubles. :)
That said, I thought that the scenery was GORGEOUS and there were several moments that I did enjoy - for some strange reason, the moments I found myself liking most were those in which Aragorn and Legolas would start speaking Elvish to each other. I'm not exactly sure why, but I thought that was extremely cool. Gollum was at the same time freaky and cool and one of the things that I thought the movie did an excellent job in portraying.
When I left the theater, I was convinced that I never wanted to even hear the third movie mentioned, much less ever darken the door of a theater to see it play. I'm not sure how I feel now - I'll probably still go, but I'll just go to see a fantasy movie that has some relation to the Lord of the Rings. I won't go to see Tolkien, because this movie proved that that was an idealistic expectation.