Insert [Superlative] Here

Rating: Null/10 (20 December 2001)

I went in with trepidation. Fellowship of the Ring is the slowest book in the trilogy, and I couldn't see how they could turn it into a successful movie. After 30 minutes of TV commercials and the 6th cell phone going off I realized that I was surrounded by morons and that if the movie started to drag it would get very ugly.
That didn't happen. Everyone was spellbound. No talking over the movie, and almost no one got up throughout the entire thing. For a three-hour film in a theater full of cell-phone wielding morons drinking giant sodas, that's saying something. During Boromir's fall one of said morons was so engrossed, even, that she let her phone ring for a full three minutes.
So, the film is absolutely the best adaptation anyone could have done. The sets, effects, and performances were great, and the attention paid to the book itself was more like homage. They even included the cloud of bird spies that caught up to them in the mountains. Sure, they excluded Tom Bombadil but Tolkien fans themselves have always argued about his relevance. And, yes, they introduced the Arwen/Aragorn love story two books early, but the changes they made were clearly for a reason and clearly with due respect for the Tolkien opus. They turned a wonderful but slowly evolving book into a movie whose pacing built and built and built.
I know the story by heart, but when they were cornered in Moria by the orcs I said, "they're screwed," and when they were confronted by the Balrog, I said, "they're really screwed," and when Aragorn turned the corner at the Gates of Gondor and saw the horde of orcs and uruk-hai, I said, "now they're definitely screwed." If I have any complaints at all it would be that Rivendale was like a ghost town, when in every book it was always overflowing with song and laughter. But seeing Lothlorien and watching Legolas mow down charging orcs like a chain gun made up for it.
Frankly, this is one of the best movies ever made, and to the people who are slamming it here, you must have really pathetic and bitter lives that you can't recognize a tour de force when you see one. Go refill your prescriptions of thorazine or prozac and shut the hell up.