Nope, nope, and, uh... almost

Rating: Null/10 (18 December 2002)

Just seen it w/ 2 friends, and... well the three of us weren't overly impressed.
1. Storyline. Omissions and some changes are always in order. Most of Jackson's changes in Pt. 1 follow the BBC radio version. Fine. Tolkien's pt.2 is fairly choking to me at times - he wanted chivalry, so there's a lot of kneeling and being knighted to serve The King etc. *yuck* to me - but lotsa people like it. Jackson skips much of that, and replaces it with a little bit of "die for the nation". yuck.
2. Characters. The novel has at least some complexity in several characters. They botch up things and pay for it. Good & educational. Jackson skips much of that, replacing some of it with his own invented father-daughter "follow your destiny" - "no I'll follow my heart" conflict. Not good enough.
Some characters are one-dimensional much of the time, but then they just flip to another pose without any apparent reason. Others are just sliced into rather thin cardboard. Gollum is an exception, being explicitly and over-explicitly schizo. Tolkien's creation was racialist (meaning: race determines character). Jackson "fixes" this by making everybody white except the rest, which are monsters. okaaayy... Now in Tolkien the elf-dwarf-man relation would perhaps show that race can be transcended with an effort (at least among good races). Here it's simply inexplicable why they're such good friends. Gollum is perhaps the saver characterwise, but then we move to...
3. Visuals Is this the greatest CGI of all time? Well, it's really good, but last I checked the clock it hadn't stopped ticking yet. The landscapes looked good - though the snow-clad mountain ranges got fairly repetitive. The massed creatures looked good and moved good. The single creature at close range (Gollum/Sméagol) looked like some latex CGI concoction. Not quite there yet, but perhaps in a few year's time. (oh, the trees just looked whacky, but what the heck, the idea is freaked-out anyway)
Then there's the nagging question, it's the most expensive, overwhelming, fantastic project, created by hundreds of talented people working for months... and we get *this*??? Watchable but immensely forgettable.