Essex, I'm with you on this one!
However ungainly and disappointing the film is as a whole, it does have John Hurt's Aragorn, some very atmospheric sequences and above all,
accuracy in its favour. I saw it as a valiant but ultimately doomed first attempt at commiting LotR to film, and all we needed was for the technology to improve enough for all the fantastic races, creatures and places to be portrayed effectively.
This does then lead me slightly off-topic to say that ever since Bakshi (and before, in fact) I'd always assumed that the only real stumbling block to filming the trilogy was the visual realization of Middle Earth. So when the technology finally did catch up and PJ's films brilliantly portrayed Tolkien's world, I was
so disappointed, confused and baffled that so much of the story was changed. It was as if PJ had done all the difficult stuff, but then inexplicably altered what didn't need altering.
