Overall Rating
  Awesome: 76.54%
Worth A Look: 11.1%
Just Average: 4.81%
Pretty Crappy: 2.63%
Sucks: 4.92%
23 reviews, 736 user ratings
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| Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The |
by Ani, the Whore of Corgan
"The movie 'rings' true to the book! Hahaha! Get it?"
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Back in November, I thought that I'd never seen anything quite as odd as the dozens of small, costumed children camping out at the theater for the opening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.
I was wrong. But sometimes it's great to be wrong!Luckily for me, only a month later, another of my favorite classic fantasy books was released as a film and I got to go through the whole shebang again. Except this time it wasn't small children wearing brightly coloured robes, it was adults standing in a two-hour line speaking …Elvish.
I kid you not.
J.R.R. Tolkien's famous trilogy The Lord of the Rings was recently named Best Book of the Century, so it's not really a surprise that devout fans of the books have been waiting for a worthy movie adaptation for 40 years now. Peter Jackson stepped up to this seemingly impossible task - and the relatively unknown director pulled it off with unexpected flying colors.
In order to create a film version of the Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson had to create an entirely different world, Middle Earth. It's populated with elves, dwarves, dragons, goblins, wizards, and the like, along with gothically gorgeous cities and living mountains capable of killing people who set foot on their peaks.
The story is this: Frodo Baggins, a hobbit played by Elijah Wood, inherits a Ring of Power from his uncle Bilbo and soon discovers that it's the One Ring created by Sauron, the Dark Lord and the enemy of all the good peoples in Middle Earth. Gandalf the wizard (played by brilliant British theater actor Ian McKellan,) pretty much hands him his valises and shoves him out the door on a quest to destroy the evil Ring. On his road, the Fellowship is formed, a group of nine representatives of all the beings in the land whose job is to take the ring to the land of Mordor and fling it into a volcano.
While that task isn't easy to begin with, they also have to contend with uglier than sin Orcs and Goblins, a turncoat wizard named Saruman who wants the ring for his own unseemly purposes, and of course the evil minions of the Dark Lord, all of whom lust for Frodo's blood.
The story itself is amazing. The movie visuals turn it into something that completely sucks the audience in. A movie, of course, is never as good as the book upon which it's based, but this one sticks so close to Tolkien's Middle Earth that I found nearly no fault with it. One of the few lower points in the movie was Liv Tyler's interpretation of the immortal elf Arwen, a character that Peter Jackson developed more for the movie version. She was developed so much, in fact, that she edged another character out of the movie completely, but the point is that Tyler was a little too flaky to play someone who is upwards of 2500 years old. (Hugo Weaving [The Matrix] played her father, Elrond the Elven-king, and his superb performance more then made up for Tyler's ineptness.)
The rest of the Fellowship, on the other hand, is impeccable. Orlando Bloom as Legolas the archer and Viggo Mortensen playing the displaced king Aragorn are both cast perfectly and portray their characters beautifully. The computer effects are breathtaking, the battle scenes astonishing. The musical score, composed by Howard Shore and Enya, is a rich tapestry of sounds evoking both happiness and despair, with occasional lovely verses in Elvish. The combination of all the factors makes for one marvelous piece of cinematography. Wait until you have a free three hours and go see it; you're sure to completely forget about your popcorn.
Ani's Minireview: GIVE ME THE OTHER TWO! NOW! NOW! NOW!See this movie, but be warned: it really is rump-numbingly long. (I've seen in 6 times, and my ass is now immune.)
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=897&reviewer=306
originally posted: 02/27/02 12:10:01
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Trilogy Starters: For more in the Trilogy Starters series, click here.
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USA
19-Dec-2001 (PG-13)
DVD: 29-Aug-2006
UK
19-Dec-2001 (PG)
Australia
11-Dec-2001 (PG)
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