Boring

Rating: 6/10 (26 December 2002)

I am one who has never read more than just The Hobbit. I really enjoyed LOTR 1 because it was truly interesting. There was character development, and a rather good introduction that helped you understand what was going on. You cared about the adventurers and felt the emotions they did as they escaped perilous circumstances.
However, this movie was extremely boring and hard to follow. Many new characters were introduced, with no character development. I don't even remember the names of the people from the first one, and they continuously rattled off all these new names, when we had no idea who they were, or why we cared about them.
We had no idea why Gandalf was so interested to help a King whose subjects were a bunch of poor dirty-faced peasants. There were too many groups of men wandering around, and no attempt was made to establish who they were and why we should hate or love them.
I kept waiting for it to get good and it was only mildly entertaining, maybe 20 minutes in 3 hours. They could have easily made it in 2 hours.

Gollum was extremely annoying to watch. He reminded me of Dobby in Harry Potter, and was as annoying as Jar Jar Binks. Seeing him beat and chained was also extremely abusive and hard to watch.
The main characters were obviously distracted in this movie and did not give as good of performances as they did in the first and as they will in the 3rd.