Hmmmm. I finally got to see the movie last night from start to finish. Amazing special effects, reasonably good acting from some of the cast and lots of shots of places I know, although some of it was pretty heavily embellished with special effects. You might be interested to know that the scenes on the great river were, in fact, filmed on at least four, and possibly five, different rivers!
However I stand by my statement made in the murky depths of the earlier posts to this thread that they got the hobbits wrong. And as for Frodo ... well, I kept expecting George Michael to step into frame and put the hard word on him at any moment.
And that was a shame, since they did, as I think JazzO has said, get the blue screening exactly right, and while Ian McKellan isn't my original idea of Gandalf, he did a creditable job. The dwarves were good. If you have to have a baddy, why not Sean Penn, and the elves were spot-on. But then I knew that, because I know one of the actors who played an elven lord at Rivendell.
I was less impressed by the Uruk Hai, however. They looked like they'd been hijacked from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
My major concern was the lack of depth, which is, I admit, almost impossible to reproduce in a movie with the breadth of this one (and its two sequels). If you'd never read LOTR, you wouldn't have known squat about Gondor, Strider/Aragorn's association with it, why the Gap of Rohan was closed to the travellers, yadda, yadda, yadda. And I must admit I was wondering how Jackson would portray Tom Bombadil. Now I know - written right out of the script! Poor old Tom. Back to the Barrowdowns, his house, and his beautiful wife, I suppose.
Oh, by the way, where can I buy a balrog pup? I need one for these cold winter nights to cut down on the heating bills ...
