Great but like in all movies, flaws exist

Rating: 10/10 (18 December 2002)

-----SPOILERS IN MY REVIEW---- I won't bother writing what was great about this movie because most of it was, but theres a few things that bothered me.
1. This film is supposedly much darker than the fellowship of the ring, but when i went to see the midnight premiere, there were twice as many jokes in TTT than FOTR. There are some genuinely humurous jokes but many were not and were so belabored that it demoted the seriousness of the situation, which was the near destruction of the Rohan people.
2. I already knew that Haldir was showing up at Helms deep and thought it was a cool idea and didnt go stark raving mad over the change of the story. But the character development was paper thin for haldir which in turn didn't make me care about his death. In Fact, you only see him fight in one scene, and thats when he is killed a split second later, so he doesn't seem like such a great elven warrior. And what happened to the Elves after the battle of helms deep?, nothing was shown of them, or even of people coming out of the Deep.
3. I liked how the movie emphasized the despair and desperation of the Rohan people by making young kids go into battle, but you never see any of these kids die or fight, or even see any dead kids lying around. This might have been because it then wouldve given the film an "R" rating'
4. Theres a certain feeling that wasn't there that existed in the fellowship, and that was flow, things flowed well in that story, but that is because there is only one story, not 3 individual ones, and an occasional 4(arwen flashbacks). But even then, the story could have flowed better. Breaking up the battle of helms deep was a bad idea in my opinion, it just isn't suppose to be done and ruins the mood. I was on the edge of my seat when the Defenders had bows ready and and the Uruk Hai stomped the ground. But then it breaks to another story a few minutes later, then brings us back to the battle, then back to another story and so on...
I know it is easy to criticize and that some do not agree. It could be because i was watching this film in a packed theatre starting at midnight, when the two previous nights i got 7 hours of sleep total and sitting next to some wierd obsessed fan that smelled bad and kept muttering lines of the book to herself and laughing obnoxiously at every joke and screaming during the battle scenes that brought me to write down what i believed was wrong with the film...
But 10/10 to Peter Jackson and the CAst and im anxiously looking forward to a ROTK trailer that will hopefully come out later with the TTT as was the case with FOTR.
Excellent Movie...but read the book too, as this film strayed quite a bit away from the book