Interesting, to put it mildly.

Rating: 10/10 (3 January 2003)

The first time I saw this one, I could not decide if I had seen a great film or just a mediocre flick. After my second viewing, my mind were made up. This movie is another masterpiece from Team Jackson. I had some initial problems with the rewrites, but as the scenes "sunk in" they made perfectly good sense. A lot of shortcuts were inevitable since the story is impossible to film. Jackson have made some people very angry with some of the changes, but if one just puts down the book and watches the film instead, one will find that these changes actually works.
*Some Minor Spoilers*
There have been outcries about the Warg-scene, and how this did not happen in the book. That is correct, it did not happen Right There, but it actually DID happen in another place in the book (minus the actual wolf riders that were taken from another book written by Tolkien). It means Jackson just moved the incident to another time and place, no big deal really.

There are a lot of rewrites in this part, some are brilliant and some kind of, well, meaningless. But as a whole they make for a great movie experience. Heck, for my part they could have shaved Gandalf, painted him blue and called him Grand Smurf, and I still would have watched in awe. This IS Middle Earth. They made it! They took one of the greatest books in the world and made a movie based on it. That is pretty amazing in my book.
Hats off to Team Jackson. Salute! 9/10.