I didn’t like this movie because it ruined the books for me. I’ve read the books numerous times and I know them forwards and backwards, but watching the movie was a major disappointment because:

1) The way I had imagined the books was totally over-ridden by the way the movie portrayed the characters and events.

2) The movie was not as faithful to the books as I had hoped.

The first disappointment is to be expected. It is an impossibility to make a movie to each reader’s vision of the book. The second disappointment, however, was not expected. I can deal with departing from minor details and adding in small cinematic twists, but the deletion of an entire character, event, and place (Tom Bombadil, the tree that nearly eats one of the hobbits, and the Barrow-downs) was going too far.

I understand that the movie was already long and that the production time and cost was outrageously high, but J.R.R. Tolkien spent more time perfecting this story in book form.

The movie itself, from a cinematic viewpoint, is amazingly detailed and goes above and beyond what is expected for special effects, costumes, and sets, but that still doesn’t make up for the book-to-movie flaws.

I highly suggest that anyone who saw this movie also reads the books.

-Asmithar