All that I could imagine

Rating: 10/10 (19 December 2001)

This film took a remarkable amount of work, both to make, and to figure out what material to include from the books. And after spending the last week-and-a-half searching out every internet article I could find about this movie, I went in to it fully aware of every effect, every decision, every actor, every prop, and everything else.
Within twenty minutes, all of this had vanished from my mind. Although I've read all the books, they vanished, in part, from my awareness. As Arwen ran Frodo across the ford, I was sitting, fists clenched, cheering her on. In the final scene with Boromir and Aragorn, I cried more than I ever have in a theater (at home is different). And the books are *not* a pre-requisite. Though the initial prologue is a bit awkward, it aided the two people on my group of five that had never read the books, and enabled them to follow--and to want the sequel as immediately and as urgently as I do.
The orcs are ugly. The uruk-hai are scary. The hobbits are three feet tall, and the emotions are stunning and genuine. As a film solely by itself, yes, it is incomplete. But nothing exists in a vacuum, and so knowing that there are six hours of movie left to go, I consider it a fine film, and probably the best literary adaptation I've ever seen.