Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring

By the time this movie came out I had only read The Hobbit. I was looking forward to this movie and from the buzz it sounded like it would be a decent substitution for the book.

Not being a fan of his I was a little skeptical of Elijah Wood being cast as Frodo Baggins. Other things that I was looking forward to were how badly the "tricks" would be to make the Hobbits short while still being around all of the normally sized people. Also, how much worse would it get with the very tall John Rhys-Davies being cast as Gimli the Dwarf.

To say I was pleasantly surprised is a vast understatement. The camera tricks were mostly indistinguisable. The story and script were highly compelling. The scenery was "all of that". Of particular interest were two actors for whom this movie jumped started their careers: Orlando Bloom (as Legolas) and Viggo Mortensen (as Aragorn). These two were very good. Also fairly notable were Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee and Christopher Lee as Saruman the White.

The strongest performance was turned in by veteran Ian McKellen who played the mysterious, tempermental and patient Gandalf the Grey. Not only was he able to put forward the seemingly conflicting characteristics I just mentioned, but he was well cast as he looked like the Gandalf I had pictured while reading The Hobbit.

By the time I finally read the books I realized a few things about the movie. First, what was in the movie was pretty religious in its following of the book. Obviously some liberties were taken but they were not terribly huge and they did not alter the story much.

Second, the pace of the movie was much faster than the book. This is because Tolkein was a fairly verbose man. Many descriptives and background passages were given in the book that sometimes read as slowly and cumbersome as Genesis in the Bible. Fortunately Peter Jackson did not maintain an allegiance to the book's pace.

Finally, I had unreasonable expectations of how much of the book would be in the movie (or the extended version on DVD). There were many, many scenes left out of the movie that gave some good background, were very interesting or very fun. As it turns out some of these scenes from the book helped a lot of the understanding of scenes in the movie.

Overall this movie was worth all of the Oscars that the third movie eventually won. It was very well put together all around. I watched this movie a few times on the big screen and would watch it a few more if it were possible.

Grade: A+