Decent movie, read the book first

Rating: 4/10 (3 September 2006)

The entire Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is a complete travesty. I read these books when I was very young (I'm 24 now) and after watching the movies and seeing the new covers for the books, my disappointment was heightened. One of the major purposes of any work of fiction is to exercise the imagination in the form of creating images of the things in the work, especially the characters. Now, when someone reads these books after watching the movies (even The Hobbitt) the reader will have a preset image of the characters that they've seen. The Lord of the Rings is one of history's greatest series of fictional books simply because of the imagination put forth in creating an entire world to base it on; that's now basically ruined because of the movies. A good comparison would be the Dune series, which I now feel uncomfortable reading simply because I saw the Sci-fi channels presentations of the book and Children of Dune. The only reason that the movie deserves a 4 is because of the quality of it.