The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

It begins just as I had envisioned it would.

Howard Shore's beautifully somber score delicately builds behind a simple black screen. A gentle voice mournfully utters "The world is changing." Chills run down your neck. Your breath starts to come in rasps. And finally, your heart stops beating. As our narrator slowly speaks, her voice coming from the ominous blackness, realization silently strikes you: you're about to be whisked away to a world that really existed in its full glory long, long ago.

Nestled in this abundant history is the story of a hobbit. Frodo Baggins was young and brash, but wise beyond his years. He could sense that something was amiss when Gandalf the Gray, atop his horse and carriage, ventured slowly into the grassy villas of Hobbiton. What to make of his suspicion, however, he did not know. Gandalf's peaceful entrance belies the long, dark quest Frodo, along with several companions, would soon leave everything they had ever known to embark on.

The beginning of Frodo's quest is brought to lush, vibrant life in The Fellowship of the Ring. To say that Peter Jackson created only a film would do it an injustice. Jackson, along with fellow scriptwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, has taken J.R.R. Tolkien's literary masterpiece and created its own world. It's a world of many races, sorcery, abundant evil, and heroism.

We're introduced to this world by an extended prologue. Covering the course of over three thousand years in several minutes, it's a breathless account of the transfer of the One Ring. Awesome to behold and brutal in its majesty, the introduction sets a frantic pace for the story to come.

The story glides along, never pausing for a second. Being a fan of the books, I realize that there is an enormous amount of material to translate to the film. The Fellowship of the Ring, as written by Tolkien, is perhaps the most difficult to film of all three novels. It seems, however, that Jackson has laughed in the face of those who doubted his incredible filmmaking ability and created an adaptation that not only stunningly visualizes the events portrayed in the novel, but in many circumstances, improves upon them.

To create such a vividly realized world, Jackson employed the talents of the world's foremost Tolkien talents. John Howe and Alan Lee worked as conceptual artists, helping design the intricate sets brought to masterful life by production designer Grant Major. Also present on the crew was several of the world's leading Tolkien linguists, those masters of all forms of Tolkien dialect from Black Speech to Dwarvish to Elvish. Surveying over the luscious landscapes of Middle-Earth (a transformed New Zealand) is the remarkable cinematography of Andrew Lesnie. The look and feel of the film is impeccably great; it's a dark and gritty actualization of the visual talents of a talented and devoted film crew.

Part of that crew is an ensemble of actors that is nearly unparralleled. Each actor showed remarkable devotion to the source material by completely immersing themselves in the parts they play. Particularly successful are Ian McKellen as Gandalf and Viggo Mortenson as Strider/Aragorn. Elijah Wood is also riveting as the wide-eyed ring-bearer Frodo, and Ian Holm and Christopher Lee also gladly bring their characters, Bilbo Baggins and the evil wizard Saruman, to life. John Rhys-Davies, Orlando Bloom, Sean Astin, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Liv Tyler, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, and Sean Bean are equally splendid in their more limited roles as Gimli, Legolas, Sam, Merry, Pippen, Arwen, Galadriel, Elrond, and Boromir, respectively. It's a huge cast of characters, but each one is given a unique personality to separate themself from the rest. There is not a weak link in the entire acting crew.

WETA, Jackson's personally developed and financed special effects house and props producing company, has done some truly fantastic work. The sets are filled with hundreds of trinkets, cups, books, and other environment enhancing props that add to the historical feel of the film.

The digital effects are close to flawless, creating several entirely CG creatures that are masterfully conceived. The Cave Troll and the Balrog are hugely inventive enemies and their interaction with the environment and characters is incredibly complex. Gollum, who is seen only briefly, is delightfully sinister. The alteration of scenery is also simply stunning, creating more beauty and awe than can be seen in almost any film since the glory days of Stanley Kubrick and David Lean.

I could go on and on about the majestic glory of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. But, simply put, I've run out of praising adjectives to describe my experience. That's exactly what Fellowship is: an experience. Peter Jackson's first movie in an already filmed trilogy of mammoth proportions is nothing short of a masterpiece of all time cinema. It might be the greatest film to be seen since 1993's Schindler's List (which I usually regard as the greatest film of all time).

Film is an art and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the art form at its absolute peak.

This, my friends, is film history.

On a scale of 1 to 10 scary riders : 10

Here's a compendium on various writings about The Lord of the Rings
And this is the greatest site for information on the films
Also, an article was written about the film's script by the WGA (Writer's Guild of America)