8 out of 10
 

It was a nice movie. The scenes and sets were nice, the monsters and computer animation very well done. Of course, I made a teensy mistake: I read the book before seeing the movie.

The movie is good in its own right, but I should have known they'd cut and change parts of it. The book is just so much better. You can't blame the movie people, of course, because the movie would be even more expensive and drawn out if they included every single bit of the book in. Plus, there's a difference between describing something in a book and showing in on a screen. You can't show characters' thoughts, for example. Plus how to you make the audience see a black figure moving along the far bank of the black river during starless night? All they would see is black.

So they took parts out to keep it good, while making it shorter, and changing things to account for the missing parts. One thing I did not like was changing the motivations of Saruman. The only purpose that seemed to have held was being able to show more glamourous Hollywood special effects. I was not keen on that at all. Plus that Super Orc, or whatever that creature was supposed to be, was nowhere in the original. Finally, one significant character is killed (I won't say who) while in the book that character survives into Part 2: I have not read The Two Towers, so I don't even know if that character actually does anything there. Perhaps this character is supposed to die early so the movie makers just bumped him off a little before schedule.

Some changes I did enjoy. The added comedy bits for Merry and Pippin were funny, though Gimli's Dwarf-tossing joke was in bad taste, in my opinion. The two hobbits' first lines as the group sits down at the inn in Bree were my favourites.