The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

It's about time I reviewed this. As a DVD and film freak (not necessarily in that order), I own both the original August release and the extended 4-disc November release. I've been watching, on and off, the featurettes on the extended version (of which there are dozens) and finally finished watching the film while listening to the cast commentary (which is only one of the 4 commentaries available). I won't give a synopsis of the plot. I mean, who doesn't know what Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings is about, at least in brief? So, I'll just move onwards to raving about how this is another one of those "complete package" films. It is well-written, not exactly ripped straight from Tolkein's pages (and if you want to argue that it isn't Tolkein's book on film, I have a few choice words for that), uses special effects both subtly and extraordinarily, keeps us entertained, sports actors who both know what they are doing and have the gravitas that brings an air of intelligence and wisdom to the film, and is impressive in the quality of its detail, particularly as it's necessary to maintain this detail across three films. We've all heard how Peter Jackson has helped the economy of New Zealand by building his studios there, including his digital arts studio, and including such lovely vistas in his film that everyone wants to take a trip there. But after watching the featurettes, it starts to dawn on you what a massive undertaking this was, from making two copies of each set, both big and small (props were also made in two sizes, so there were two sizes of chairs, candlesticks, books, beer mugs, ...), to the several month-long creation of the scary model of Bilbo that we see for only a few seconds on screen, to the sounds effects guys taking an afternoon to hammer bottle caps into their shoes and walk around on a parking lot, creating that unique sound for the Orcs skittering out of the ceiling in the depths of Moria. I think I've seen the film 4 or 5 times now (and usually I pick the extended version to watch, as it is definitely better) and I become more impressed with both Ian McKellen and Orlando Bloom. There is no better actor for Gandalf than McKellen, but it's hard to go wrong with someone so tried and true. Bloom, on the other hand, was just out of acting school and he does wonders portraying elf-dom mostly through his posture and facial expressions. I'm looking forward to what he does with the character in the third film, but currently I'm looking forward to the DVD for the second film so I can see how they filmed his jaw-dropping horse-mounting scene so that it looked like he was actually doing it.

year: 2001
length: 178 min. theatrical release / 208 min. extended release
rating: 4.0
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/combined