JohnnyYouHitMe

Sometimes dark, sometimes quite weird. Delves into some pretty bittersweet themes. Christopher Lee steals the show as King Haggard & Lady Amalthea is lovely.

Another mixed bag. There was no scouring of the Shire. Sean Astin ran rings round Elijah Wood, showing more emotion in his last scenes than Wood managed in all three movies combined. There was lots of forced conflict that wasn't in the books. Interpreting Sauron as an evil lighthouse was silly. As was the ghost army. Only Theoden, Eowyn & Sam came across well. Jackson knew what made LOTR good, but not what made it great. And to me his movies will always be fun action flicks that missed the point.

Probably the best of the bunch. Mainly because we got so much of Christopher Lee and Bernard Hill. Jackson deserves credit for the way he handled the Rohirrim. It would've been so easy to make them generic, lowest common denominator 'Vikings on horses', but instead he stayed true to how Tolkien wrote them. In the extended version Eowyn even sings a lament for her dead brother in Old English, which was specially written for this movie. Helm's Deep is my favourite part of all three movies, so 8/10

A hit-and-miss movie. The cast is a mixed bag with Lee, Holm and Blanchett the best of the bunch (Wood, Mortensen & McKellen the worst) but the characterisation in general was terrible. Aragorn the 'reluctant' hero? Why? Gimli, Merry & Pippin are all clowns etc. There were some good dramatic locations to film in New Zealand (Switzerland would've been better) but the Shire ended up looking like a plastic tellytubby land. It's entertaining enough as a action movie though, so 7/10

This was a fun and inoffensive feel-good flick. Herbie's antics were never boring or annoying, and Lindsay Lohan in 2005 was beautiful.