The good news is that the Lord of the Rings movie isn't a travesty: it's faithful enough to the story and the characters for Tolkien's magic to shine through. The bad news is that, as a film, it's just a pastiche of cliches from Star Wars, martial arts movies and videogames, with kitsch references ranging from Maxfield Parrish to the Titanic. Compressing the story to three hours means that some characters get short shrift; the lesser hobbits in particular have to telegraph their parts, turning Sam into a fair-skinned Step'n Fetchit. The special effects are so-so: the transitions from real aerial shots to matte paintings to CG images are jarring and when the Fellowship marches across a simulated landscape they turn into so many jerky digital marionnettes. Let's hope someone does a better job with a remake around 2040 or so. Meanwhile, this one is good enough to have stirred up lots of old dreams from when I last obsessed about the book, 25 years ago.