selling LOTR to the public

Rating: 7/10 (7 January 2003)

before you jump on me for blasphemy, i rated this movie 8 out of 10. i'm not going to go into what i liked about it. suffice it to say that i feel it was pretty complete, very well acted, and of course the production is incredible. almost perfect.
so just let me give you 5 reasons why it's not 10/10:
1. the CG grandness is ANNOYING (but at least not as annoying as in the Fellowship). how many times must we take a flight through various caverns and structures, rotating impossibly around the towers, basically the stuff of the Back To The Future ride at Universal or the Star Wars ride at Disney. are movies going to learn from video game cut-scenes and computer graphic demos? or shouldn't it be the other way around? i can forgive this tho, CG is still fairly young and i'm praying that CG directors will finally get off the "we can do it therefore we should" and start thinking about ART.
2. Why was Gimli turned into comic relief? To reach some strange audience? do the producers think the movie wouldn't sell if we didn't make fun of a short guy? uncool. just uncool. Gimli is a dark and tragic character in the *REAL* LOTR. i cannot forgive this.
3. all those sad women and children at Helmsgate. Awwwwww. what a waste of screen time. reminded me of the horrors of Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome and the SCI FI channel version of Dune. ugh. edit that filler out. put in more dialog to explain the reasons why Rohan and Gondor are not (yet) working together. that was such an important part of the book and it's not well explained in the movie.
4. Aragorn's love life blown out of proportion. a friend of mine says it's probably directed at the female viewers as Vigo is a hotty. but again, an unnecessary drawing out of an already long movie. but i can forgive this, Tolkien's Two Towers was pretty cold, a little love ain't a bad thing. just a little too much of it. it broke the story apart too much.
5. Legolas skateboarding down the stairs while shooting his bow at the orcs. now this i cannot even fathom. is Jackson MAD??? i know, 10 seconds in a 3+ hour movie. but i almost screamed in anguish when i saw that. it wasn't even well done. it happens out of the blue and it's unclear even what Legolas was riding. was it a shield? a piece of wood? an Element deck with Darkstar wheels? those stupid stupid 360 frames of film. we hates it. we hates it forever!
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the Two Towers was a very gloomy book. a difficult read. i can understand why Jackson would want to liven it up a bit. but he went too far. good thing there was enough in the movie to make up for it (gollum, the dead marshes, and the continuing ability for Jackson and his crew to tell a very difficult story in the visual medium)