Spectacular but rather "lo-fi"

Rating: 5/10 (10 December 2003)

Spectacular truly it is. And magnificent and epic. And another long list of nice adjectives. But it distorts heavily the character of the original novel. Most who voted did it thinking of Tolkien's work, I believe, and not of this production. I mean Jackson is an excellent director and I am a great fan of his, and even the first chapter was quite ok (although not astronomically great), but THIS chapter is quite bad. Battles are changed (for example no elves appear at Helm's Deep in the book, especially not high elves!), Gimli becomes a parody of himself, parts are added to the events (poor Faramir!), epic parts like the Ents are resized and reduced... the best actor is definitely the only non-human: Gollum. Or at least he's the one who respects the most the original script, in words and thoughts. As usual, those few who haven't read the book will love this movie. The others will probably just tolerate it. I hardly did.