not my kind of film, i guess?

Rating: Null/10 (8 January 2003)

Wow. This film is loved by nearly everyone on the face of this earth, and is, of course, high in the top 250 at imdb.com. I don't really get it, but I guess it's not my thing. Should be certainly true, especially when it's loved so feverishly much.
I don't know what to say; it didn't keep my interest really. There were some pretty well done moments, but there were moments (long, long moments) where I was either bored out of my mind or nitpicking the CGI.
Good thing is that there's nothing wrong with any of the CGI. It's nearly flawless. Sadly, it seemed like the whole damn movie was made out of CGI. I was noticing how much there was of it, and I realized nearly three quarters through that all I was really doing was seeing how the CGI worked into scenes. What a distraction. I know Jackson wanted the battle scenes to be filled with millions of people, but couldn't he used close up shots of real people (less, but still a lot)? It's definitely possible. Look at some battle scenes from movies made before 1997.
And the cinematography got down right muddled and uninteresting at points. Except for the rare nice shots, the whole movie seemed to be filmed with the same sweeping camera movements (over the battle scenes) and used the brown looking color scheme a bit too much.
The characters themselves aren't very interesting. Frodo gets downright annoying sometimes. I'm sorry to say I've never read any of the books, and I can only imagine what it did for the characters in them. They're probably wonderful, imaginative, compelling stories. If so, this film is ultimately generic.
All I'm saying is that it's not my cup of tea. Obviously, it's millions of others. That's cool though.
What would be even cooler is if I could show some of these hardcore fans Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures." I wonder how much they'd like "The Two Towers" then.