Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

You can tell that Galadriel is a “legendary elven warrior” because she can masterfully twirl her broadsword and complete the obligatory Scarlett Johansson combat roll, while never breaking her expression of grim, yet lovely, determination. That sober expression is essential to being elven, because it marks you as serious. And everyone here is serious. If acting is reciting lines of ponderous maxims (“The tides of fate are flowing”) in whispered tones, without facial affect, then there is some real acting going on here. And if you long to have your symbolism served as heavy and as cold as a Snow Troll’s thighs, while you pretend to care about creatures that never existed, locked in a battle against a form of Evil more in love with its own art direction than in spreading terror, knock yourself out. But what irks me is that the story’s grand establishing shots are so Maxfield Parrish-stagey and each shot so storyboard-contrived (you can freeze-frame at virtually any point and get a cool graphic novel cell) that by the time the actual, you know... characters... get to say or do something, their options are nil. They will do what they’ve been framed to do. In this way the series owes more to Dr. Who than to Tolkien. It’s this airless staginess, besotted by its own tidy, sterile beauty, that sucks the life out of things. The LOR trilogy with its huge cinematic frame, could accommodate the heaviness of its dialogue and symbolism - there was so much more room to move - but this small screen epic feels cheesy by virtue of its hermetically sealed script. Instead of opting for free-wheeling intimacy, where we might have seen characters dealing with smaller scale but no less important Middle Earth issues, the filmmakers tried to copy the grandiosity of the original and wound up only with its pose.