The best film for many years

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2001)

The responsibility, nay fear, of tackling a project like Lord of the Rings must have been nearly over overwhelming for Peter Jackson, when faced with this kind of film Directors often tend to stick religiously to the source material or they just fluff it completely. And yet this film manages to both be different enough from the book that it works cinematically while also leaving diehard fans of the novel ecstatic.
The film screams epic from start to end, with a multitude of wide-angled shots to leave you breathless, the film looks stunning throughout and does well to portray Middle Earth as a living breathing and believable place, everything just looks right. Places such as Rivendell and the halls of Moria are stunning and location shooting is mixed with CG to stunning effect.
The music is stably operatic, it's used masterfully throughout to heighten tension and emotion.
The acting too is almost consistently excellent Ian McKellen plays a superb Gandalf full of strength along with age and wisdom and that bit of quirkiness that fans of the novel know so well. Ian Holme has Bilbo as a wonderful mix between a skittering Hobbit and someone haunted by life. The entire fellowship hangs together well though Gimli comes off a bit `Scotty' and is therefore a bit more amusing than he necessarily should be especially since humour is already well taken care of by Merry and Pippin.
Essentially the film is an Action orientated drama and many of the quieter scenes from the book are omitted in order to do justice to the real crowd pleasers, and justice is indeed done, the scene with the Balrog is from begging to end one of the greatest moments in cinema history, it's powerful dramatic and emotional and leaves audiences stunned, and there are great scenes like this throughout, the ringwraiths approaching the hobbits, the chase on horseback, the battle a the end with Boromir all of them captivating.
This emphasis on action does have a few drawbacks however, Rivendell it hardly seen beyond the council of Elrond and fails to come over as the accommodating place it is in the novel, the greatest injustice however is to Lorien which comes off as a somewhat fearful place rather than one which turns even Gimli into an admirer of elves, speaking of which much of the fellowships character is lost and the strange love-hate friendship between Legolas and Gimli is not played upon.
These are minor quibbles however, much of what was cut eg. Tom Bombadil is not missed and what is in the film is uniformly excellent, over three hours there was not one moment I particularly disliked and there were a countless number of times I was simply blown away. This is the best film for many, many years and easily rivals the greatest films ever.