No one expected the films to be 'flawless', but Jacksons teatment of the first film made me so angry that I nearly walked out of the cinema. The overwhelming feeling was that the breadth and depth of Tolkien's vision had been utterly trivialised. Two main things - Tolkien's marvellous dialogue and use of language was changed to a bunch of primary-school cliches, presumably so the lowest common denominators in the audience could follow the plot - certainly it had to be cut back enormously, but something of the richness of the language could have been retained - at one point one of the characters says something like "Let's go hunt some orc" - pardon me while I throw up! Secondly the first film avoided a treatment of the difficult moral choices made by the characters, particularly in Lothlorien - to take one example, the fact that the destruction of the one ring will lead to the decay of all the Elves have worked for in Middle-Earth. Without this moral seriousness the whole thing was more like an extended round of Dungeons and Dragons than a story for grown ups. Furthermore many of the incidents in the story were utterly trivialised - the absurd all-in brawl at the council of Elrond, the sado-masochistic treatment of the death of Boromir (how many arrows in the gut can one man take) the WWF wrestling for wizards between Saruman and Gandalf - Tolkien's evokation of the smouldering menace in this encounter was changed to the absurd sight of two old men clawing each other on the floor, completely destroying the dignity and gravitas that is such a vital part of Gandalf's character.I will leave it there, but could go on, and on!

Glad to have got that off my chest...