I was really really surprised to find out my wife loved it. The reviews I had read (which I didn't tell her about) said "if you thought LotR was people walking for 3 hours, AUJ is people literally walking for 3 hours." Even though that is her exact description of LotR, she felt the exact opposite of this. She leaned over to me an hour in and said "they've already had more dialog in this movie than all three of the others." And it's true, people talk about things, instead of just focusing on Elijah Wood's puppy-dog eyes.darth_ender said:
See, considering the many lukewarm reviews, I was feeling a bit depressed. But it seems the real fans like you guys enjoy the movie. Thanks for the spoiler-free reviews, and for keeping my spirits high. I'll probably end up seeing it this coming weekend.
I can't wait for the documentaries, I'm eager to find out how a lot of these effects were done. If they truly stopped using all the bigatures, I couldn't tell. There were a lot more totally CGI characters, but the detail on them was incredible.
I really want to see it again. Maybe when we're up in Chicago in a couple weeks we'll see it in 3D HFR. The battles were kind of hard to follow (much like the battles in LotR) and knowing that there's a way to see them clearly intrigues me. The issue is that you do miss out on the colors. My wife took her 3D glasses off to rub her eyes and had me take off mine for a minute to see the beautiful colors of Rivendale that we were missing because of the lack of brightness of the screen.