M Blaker

Visually impressive, but nothing we've not seen before and certainly less than you'd expect for the touted $billion price tag. There's a strange inverse pyramid whereby the smaller the part the more interesting the character (Lenny Henry was one of the few positives). The main cast are given reams of wooden, poorly crafted, clumsy expository dialogue they seem uncomfortable delivering, resulting in perfomances reminiscent of a daytime soap opera. The pacing is flat, with no dramatic peaks other than the occasional hint that something unpleasant is lurking somewhere. I have an image of Jeff Bezos sat in his high tower, looking down on us as the world enters a period of turmoil, thinking to himself "I got all this money and don't care what I do with it." A shoddily assembled, uninteresting self-indulgence is the last thing we needed from the Tolkien legacy.