I have debated over how to write this review for close to two days now and I haven't gotten any closer to a solution so here is my thoughts on it rate it how you will and take from it what you will.
First, if have never read they original books then chances are that you are gonna love this movie. It is action packed, has a love story, and has a great script and dialog. Got see it now… no I mean now… go … shoo…
If you have read the book, but not recently and don't have a very good recollection of what happened in them something along the lines of this: “There was some chasing and Tree people, they attacked a tower and there was a big fight at a castle. Frodo hooked up with Gollum and… um…they did some shit.” Then you sort of fall into the first category and you should head out there to see it as well. Make sure you don't pick up the book or anything on your way out though.
If you have read the book and know what goes on in it you can tell me how long the entmoot lasted and what the result is then most likely this movie is going to piss you off. Don't read to much into that, it is a great movie, but it runs along the lines of the 2001/2010 series of movies. They are sort of loosely based on the books as is this movie. I don't know what the director has against the Stewards of Gondor, but he persists in both movies to make them evil and obsessed with the ring, while in the books that isn't the case at all. He also completely turns around the Ents and their parts in it all and I have no fucking idea why. It almost makes you wonder if someone got to his copy of the books and edited to fit their view of them or something. He adds a lot of Gollum that wasn't there and takes out a lot of the Ents and Riders that should. I have no idea where the Warg battle came from or why Strider fell. Maybe he had the cliff notes or something. Watching the movie I can tell you that in the second release of this movie one of the added scenes will be the origin or Gollum, since it is painfully obvious that it was supposed to be in there (hell it is even shown in the “Two Towers a visual reference” book the they are selling. Elves (besides Leoglas) at the battle of helm's deep…WTF? The whole movie is different from the book and to someone that has just read the book it is a white hot shard in your brain how different the story is and how much it changes everything about all the characters. If they are publishing books based on this movie then I fear that there will be people pick them up and think that is how the actual books are written and don't think that is a very good thing. IMO There should be a disclaimer that says that the movies are an adaptation and do not follow the actual books. That is how different this movie is from the book.
Effects are good an I wish I had time to tell you how they did the battle at helm's deep in the computers. In short it is easiest to say that every Orc, Elf and human had its own AI and that it fought its own battle with every other enemy. Gollum's stuff is good, though at some points his screeching can get pretty annoying.
Like I said it is a good movie, but a bad adaptation.