Rating- * * * * (4/5)
If you look at the list of films that were the highest grossing of their years (in other words, the films that made the most money) you will almost always find two things common to all of them: they are usually not very good, and they appeal only to one of the two groups with the highest expendable incomes, teenage girls or geeks. Films like Armageddon and Titanic are largely romance based and feature an attractive, young male lead, thus getting every teenage girl to rush to theaters to see it, maybe multiple times. On the other side, films like the Star Wars series and X-Men appeal largely to young adult men with an interest in science fiction and fantasy (a.k.a. geeks). Now don’t be offended if I’m grouping you into one of these categories; I myself am a geek and some of my favorite people are teenage girls. It’s just that the studios have gotten used to these two groups biting at whatever they throw us and that has led to gradually worsening movies (cough…Pearl Harbor). However, The Fellowship of the Ring re-ignites my hope in the redemption of Hollywood. It would seem a very daunting task to adapt this massive work to the screen. It is filled with so much back-story, history, and detail that it includes a fifty-page appendix! Needless to say it would be very hard to try and include all these details in a screenplay that can keep the attention of an audience. The movie runs at over three hours and could easily have been longer. While many people complained about the length of the film, I found it amazingly succinct when you consider the source material. It’s not that the movie tries to keep up with all the details of the book; there’s just that much action in the story that’s worth showing. The film opens with a quick synopses of the basic back-story. In case you aren’t familiar let me try to pique your interests; in the fantasy world of Middle-Earth, which is just like earth only with magic and monsters and whatnot, there were whole bunch of rings created to split up all the magical powers of the world evenly among the different races (dwarves, elves, hobbits, and men). Hobbits are the main characters in the Lord of the Rings, and they are basically like dwarves, only smaller and very timid. Anyway, after these rings are all passed out this one guy named Sauron makes his own ring, called the One Ring, which cancels out all the other rings and gives him all of the power. His evil plan is going well until he loses the Ring. Through luck and destiny the Ring makes its way to one little hobbit named Frodo. When a wizard named Gandalf shows up and tells Frodo that the Ring is evil and that Sauron is looking for his Ring again, Frodo decides that the Ring must be destroyed and embarks on a quest to reach the only place it can be destroyed, which unfortunately is in Sauron’s backyard. While it may sound very surface, this story touches on a number of themes, including one very poignant one; that even the smallest and most timid of us must rise to the occasion in times of great distress. The acting is as good as one could hope for in these roles and the cinematography emphasizes the epic scale of this story. But most impressive of all are the special effects. Many of the scenes depicted in the novel come out looking even better than you could imagine them and some of the environments are so detailed that you see something new every time you watch. The only thing that kept this one from achieving the fifth star from me was the fact that it was a little narrow in scope. While the story was masterfully told, it didn’t really have much meaning beyond the story itself, which is something that all great movies should have. Most of the people I’ve talked to that haven’t seen this movie have said it’s because the whole fantasy thing doesn’t appeal to them. If you are one of these people, I urge you to set aside your thoughts that this is a fantasy movie. This movie appeals to everyone, geek or not, and is one of the best films of the year. If this is any indicator of the next two films in the series, you can add one more movie to your list for the next two Christmas seasons.