There is three hours of my life I won’t get back. Not only that, it seemed like four. I love science fiction/fantasy stuff. But what I consider my biggest failures in the realm is my inability to read the Tolkien trilogy. I have made 3 or 4 attempts at reading them, but fail miserably each time. I always get bogged down with all the names and strange words for things. I figured the movie would be just the thing, visuals for me to hang my synapses on. Wrong. I never did get anybody’s name straight and the two humans were so similar looking I thought for a minute they were the same person. They did a remarkable job making the normal sized actors playing hobbits look small, but I never could fully buy in. I spent most of the time figuring in my head how they did instead of paying attention. And what was it with the subtitles in sections? The whole time they were speaking English and then just for a bit lapsed. And there is this one scene as they all race down a lot of steps in a narrow, high up staircase. Naturally a section is destroyed making our characters jump over the gap. As the gap widens it is obvious that the smaller characters can’t make the leap themselves, so the human tosses the hobbits over. Then he looks at the troll and the troll says, “No one tosses a dwarf.” Tolkien wrote that? To me, it seemed like an out of place bad joke.