What more could we hope for?

Rating: 10/10 (3 January 2002)

Reading out "The Fellowship of the Ring" takes 40+ hours. Condensing this sheer mass of material to a three-hour-movie that manages to stay true to its magnificent literary source as well as to the rules of cinematic storytelling is not a small feat. Peter Jackson and his crew pulled it off; moreover, they redefined the borderlines of what cinema can offer to the senses. The movie "Fellowship of the Ring" will do for cinema what The Lord of the Rings did for literature: it will open up new dimensions of the storyteller's craft. Prof. Tolkien (and his followers/scholars) could not have wished for more.