A Scenic, Adventurous, And Long Drive

Rating: 8/10 (20 December 2001)

Have you ever gone on a really long road trip? You're seated in a car, not going anywhere for awhile until you reach the end of your destination. The route you take has beautiful imagery that pleases your eyes, and is an enjoyable ride. However, no matter how pretty the trip is, you can't deny that the trip is long. Hours and hours of seemingly crawling on the road, and no amount of imagery can decrease your desire for the trip to be over and for you to be freed from your car seat.
This, my friends, was my experience of watching "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring".
For a great and captivating story, I would've expected to like the film more. Set in the mythical village of the shire, Gandolph the Grey (Ian McKellan) has come to the village to meet up with some of his old friends, including Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and Bilbo (I love that name) Baggins (Ian Holm). When Gandolph meets with Bilbo, though, he discovers that Bilbo has a dark and powerful ring in his possession; one created by the dark lord Sauron that has a power of however wears it, making them greedy and power-hungry, to say the least. When Bilbo leaves the Shire, he leaves the ring to Frodo, meaning Frodo is the one who must get rid of the ring as well. This begins an epic (and do I mean epic) quest to destroy the ring, where Frodo and his friends embark on many dangers and setbacks. Halfway into the journey, they meet up with Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Legolas Greenleaf (Orlando Bloom), Boromir (Sean Bean) and Gimli (John Rhys Davis), and together they all form the fellowship of the ring, a group determined to, as a team, destroy Frodo's ring.
The drive was scenic thanks to the beautiful cinematography. I was spellbound by the imagery and camera work from the first spin of the spool to the last. The landscapes and places in the movie were pretty, let alone the angles and motions of the cameras in certain scenes. And the special effects blew all other movies this year out of the water. I see this movie getting many cinematography-related awards come Oscar time.
The acting was enjoyable as well. Everybody did a good job. Elijah Wood was a tad too twitch at times, but that's okay--the times he wasn't (which outnumbered the times he was by a great number) made up for it. If anybody gets nominated for an Oscar in this film though, it'll be Ian McKellan as Gandolph. My attention was fully on the screen whenever he was speaking...or just there.
But oh, the length of the drive! The poor pacing of this film killed my glowering review that I had planned on writing during the first hour. The movie dragged mercilessly, and it gave me the feeling that I'd never leave the movie theater. It moved well during the first hour, but then it started crawling from the celluloid spool and left me exhausted. I understand the a movie based on such a tome of a book is bound to be long, but the length of the film wasn't the problem I had. Plenty of movies I enjoy have clocked in at long lengths. But the long movies I enjoyed rolled smoothly and...this is the big one...didn't feel like their lengths. It actually felt like I was watching a three hour movie, and that left me winded and desperate to leave the theater.
I wanted to like this movie. I wanted my review to be nothing but brimming with praise. I wanted it to be the best film of 2001 (so far). But long drives can take the good, glowing feelings out of anybody. It was a good drive, but not one I'd want to take again anytime soon.
8/10, B+